kamu-cli VS ballista

Hi Rust community, This is a quick update on the kamu project - a tool that lets you build decentralized data pipelines and collaborate on data in a similar way to software.

Hi, I'm a developer of the kamu project and wanted to share its interesting use-case (outside of the conventional enterprise pipelines) with the Spark community.

Kamu Data. Tool for decentralized exchange and transformation of semi-structured data.

kamu is a new data management tool for rapid exchange and global collaboration on structured data.

We've been developing kamu for 2.5 years, and recently re-wrote it from Scala to Rust - best decision ever :)

His newer project, Ballista, was also donated to Apache Arrow. I hope to get the Rust skills to collaborate with him on open source work someday too. He's also doing really cool work on spark-rapids FYI.

https://github.com/ballista-compute/ballista/blob/main/rust/executor/src/flight_service.rs#L193-L228

I'm guessing Polars and Ballista (https://github.com/ballista-compute/ballista) have different goals, but I don't know enough about either to say what those might be. Does anyone know enough about either to explain the differences?

In your article you mention looking for a faster data engine, have you looked at Ballista https://github.com/ballista-compute/ballista? It’s pretty young but it uses the Apache Arrow memory model and the maintainer did a bunch of work on Apache Spark I believe.

https://github.com/ballista-compute/ballista is also a cool project worth checking out.

It’s mostly a personal favourite, but once Ballista [1] gets a bit more developed, I expect we’ll tear out our Java/Spark pipelines and replace them with that.

The ML ecosystem in Rust is a bit underdeveloped at the moment, but work is ticking along on packages like Linfa and SmartCore, so maybe it’ll get there? In my field I’m mostly about it’s potential for correct, high-performance data pipelines that are straightforward to write in reasonable time, and hopefully a model-serving framework: I hate that so many of the current tools require annotating and shipping Python when really model-serving shouldn’t really need any Python code.

[1] https://github.com/ballista-compute/ballista

I've looked at this and thought it looked amazing, but also haven't used it for anything. Some thoughts...

Rust is a blessing and curse. I seems like the obvious choice for data pipelines, but everything big currently exists in Java and the small stuff is in Javascript, Python or R. Maybe this will slowly change, but it's a big ship to turn. I'm hopeful that tools like this and Balista [1] will eventually get things moving.

Since the Rust community is relatively small, language bindings would be very helpful. Being able to configure pipelines from Java or Typescript(!) would be great.

Or maybe it's just that this form of computation is too foreign. By the time you need it, the project is so large that it's too late to redesign it to use it. I'm also unclear on how it would handle changing requirements and recomputing new aggregations over old data. Better docs with more convincing examples would be helpful here. The GitHub page showing counting isn't very compelling.

[1] https://github.com/ballista-compute/ballista