CDI-E: an elastic cloud service for data engineering

We live in the gilded age of data-driven computing. With public clouds offering virtually unlimited amounts of compute and storage, enterprises collecting data about every aspect of their businesses, and advances in analytics and machine learning technologies, data driven decision making is now timely, cost-effective, and therefore, pervasive. Alas, only a handful of power users can wield today's powerful data engineering tools. For one thing, most solutions require knowledge of specific programming interfaces or libraries. Furthermore, running them requires complex configurations and knowledge of the underlying cloud for cost-effectiveness.

We decided that a fundamental redesign is in order to democratize data engineering for the masses at cloud scale. The result is Informatica Cloud Data Integration - Elastic (CDI-E). Since the early 1990s, Informatica has been a pioneer and industry leader in building no-code data engineering tools. Non-experts can express complex data engineering tasks using a graphical user interface (GUI). Informatica CDI-E is built to incorporate the simplicity of GUI in the design layer with an elastic and highly scalable run time to handle data in any format without little to no user input using automated optimizations. Users upload their data to the cloud in any format and can immediately use them in conjunction with their data management and analytic tools of choice using CDI-E GUI. Implementation began in the Spring of 2017, and Informatica CDI-E has been generally available since the Summer of 2019. Today, CDI-E is used in production by a growing number of small and large enterprises to make sense of data in arbitrary formats.

In this paper, we describe the architecture of Informatica CDI-E and its novel no-code data engineering interface. The paper highlights some of the key features of CDI-E: simplicity without loss in productivity and extreme elasticity. It concludes with lessons we learned and an outlook of the future.