getting-started VS orchest

Coincidently, I saw a presentation today on a nice half-way-house solution: using embeddable Python libraries like Sling and dlt - both open-source. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAqOLgG2iYY There is also singer.io which is more of a protocol than a library, but can also be installed although it looks like it is a true community effort and not so well maintained.

Singer is an open-source framework for data ingestion, which provides a standardized way to move data between various data sources and destinations (such as databases, APIs, and data warehouses). Singer offers a modular approach to data extraction and loading by leveraging two main components: Taps (data extractors) and Targets (data loaders). This design makes it an attractive option for data ingestion for several reasons:

Thanks for chipping in.

I’ve been leaning towards this direction. I think I/O is the biggest part that in the case of plain code steps still needs fixing. Input being data/stream and parameterization/config and output being some sort of typed data/stream.

My “let’s not reinvent the wheel” alarm is going of when I write that though. Examples that come to mind are text based (Unix / https://scale.com/blog/text-universal-interface) but also the Singer tap protocol (https://github.com/singer-io/getting-started/blob/master/doc...). And config obviously having many standard forms like ini, yaml, json, environment key value pairs and more.

At the same time, text feels horribly inefficient as encoding for some of the data objects being passed around in these flows. More specialized and optimized binary formats come to mind (Arrow, HDF5, Protobuf).

Plenty of directions to explore, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. I wonder which direction is favored by users of tools like ours. Will be good to poll (do they even care?).

PS Windmill looks equally impressive! Nice job

Mage uses the Singer Spec (https://github.com/singer-io/getting-started/blob/master/docs/SPEC.md), the data engineer community standard for building data integrations. This was created by Stitch and is widely adopted.

I like the Singer Protocol, and the various tools that use it. These include meltano, airbyte, stitch, pipelinewise, and a few others

Have you looked into using a dedicated data integration tool? Have you heard of Singer and the Singer Spec? https://github.com/singer-io/getting-started/blob/master/docs/SPEC.md

Or you could build your own such system and run it on Airflow, Prefect, Dagster, etc. Check out the Singer project for a suite of Python packages designed for such a task. Quality varies greatly, though.

Our team is building out a data platform on AWS glue, and we pull from a variety of data sources including application databases and third party SaaS APIs. I have been looking into ways to standardize pulling data from different sources. The other day I came across the [Singer Specification](https://github.com/singer-io/getting-started) and was interested learning more about it. If anyone has experience working with Singer specifications, I would love to hear more about:

I just read the readme of the Singer getting started repo and am excited to write my first tap! I’m thinking instead of writing a new Airflow DAG whenever I want to pipe API data into our data warehouse I could write a singer tap and use Stitch instead. Is that a stupid idea?

You can check out our OSS https://github.com/orchest/orchest

The code example is part of our ELT/data pipeline tool called Orchest: https://github.com/orchest/orchest/

First want to say congrats to the Patterns team for creating a gorgeous looking tool. Very minimal and approachable. Massive kudos!

Disclaimer: we're building something very similar and I'm curious about a couple of things.

One of the questions our users have asked us often is how to minimize the dependence on "product specific" components/nodes/steps. For example, if you write CI for GitHub Actions you may use a bunch of GitHub Action references.

Looking at the `graph.yml` in some of the examples you shared you use a similar approach (e.g. patterns/openai-completion@v4). That means that whenever you depend on such components your automation/data pipeline becomes more tied to the specific tool (GitHub Actions/Patterns), effectively locking in users.

How are you helping users feel comfortable with that problem (I don't want to invest in something that's not portable)? It's something we've struggled with ourselves as we're expanding the "out of the box" capabilities you get.

Furthermore, would have loved to see this as an open source project. But I guess the second best thing to open source is some open source contributions and `dcp` and `common-model` look quite interesting!

For those who are curious, I'm one of the authors of https://github.com/orchest/orchest

Haven't tried it. In its favor, Argo is vendor neutral and is really easy to set up in a local k8s environment like docker for desktop or minikube. If you already use k8s for configuration, service discovery, secret management, etc, it's dead simple to set up and use (avoiding configuration having to learn a whole new workflow configuration language in addition to k8s). The big downside is that it doesn't have a visual DAG editor (although that might be a positive for engineers having to fix workflows written by non-programmers), but the relatively bare-metal nature of Argo means that it's fairly easy to use it as an underlying engine for a more opinionated or lower-code framework (orchest is a notable one out now).

If you’d like to try something for you data workflows that’s vendor agnostic (k8s based) and open source you can check out our project: https://github.com/orchest/orchest

You can find it here: https://github.com/orchest/orchest Convenience install script: https://github.com/orchest/orchest#installation

We automatically provide container level parallelism in Orchest: https://github.com/orchest/orchest

For people in this thread interested in what this tool is an alternative to: Airflow, Luigi, Kubeflow, Kedro, Flyte, Metaflow, Sagemaker Pipelines, GCP Vertex Workbench, Azure Data Factory, Azure ML, Dagster, DVC, ClearML, Prefect, Pachyderm, and Orchest.

Disclaimer: author of Orchest https://github.com/orchest/orchest