“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.” —Warren Buffet
CI/CD, a software development strategy, combines the methodologies of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Continuous Deployment to safely and reliably deliver new versions of code in iterative short cycles. This practice bridges the gap between developers and operations team by streamlining the building, testing, and deployment of the code by automating the series of steps involved in this otherwise complex process. Traditionally used to speed up the software development life cycle, today CI/CD is gaining popularity among data scientists and data engineers since it enables cross-team collaboration and rapid, secure integration and deployment of libraries, scripts, notebooks, and other ML workflow assets.
One recent report found that 80% of organizations have adopted agile practices, but for nearly two-thirds of developers it takes at least one week to get committed code successfully running in production. Implementing CI/CD can streamline data pipeline development and deployment, accelerating release times and frequency, while improving code quality.
The evolving need for CI/CD for data teams
AI’s rapid adoption is driving the demand for fresh and reliable data for training, validation, verification, and drift analysis. Implementing CI/CD enhances your Databricks development process, streamlines pipeline deployment, and accelerates time-to-market. CI/CD revolutionizes how you build, test, and deploy code within your Databricks environment, helping you automate tasks, ensure a smooth transition from development to production, and enable lakehouse data engineering and data science teams to work more efficiently. And when it comes to cloud data platforms like Databricks, performance equals cost. The more optimized your pipelines are, the more optimized your Databricks spend will be.
Why incorporate Unravel into your existing DevOps workflow?
Unravel Data is the AI-powered data observability and FinOps platform for Databricks. By using Unravel’s CI/CD integration for Databricks, developers can catch performance problems early in development and deployment life cycles and proactively take actions to mitigate issues. This has shown to significantly reduce the time taken by data teams to act on critical timely insights. Unravel’s AI-powered efficiency recommendations, now embedded right into the DevOps environments, help foster a cost-conscious culture that compels developers to follow performance and cost-driven coding best practices. It also raises awareness of resource usage, configuration changes, and data layout issues that could impact service level agreements (SLAs) when the code is deployed in production. Accepting or ignoring insights suggested by Unravel helps promote accountability for developers’ actions and creates transparency for the DevOps and FinOps practitioners to attribute cost-saving wins and losses.
With the advent of Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) AI models, data teams today have started using coding co-pilots to generate accurate and efficient code. With Unravel, this experience is a notch better with real-time visibility into code inefficiencies that can translate into production performance problems like bottlenecks, performance anomalies, missed SLAs, cost overruns, etc. Other code-assist tools like GitHub Copilot are limited in their scope of assistance to static code analysis based code rewrite suggestions, Unravel’s AI-driven Insights Engine built for Databricks considers the performance and cost impact of code and configuration changes and provides recommendations to make optimal suggestions. This helps you streamline your development process, identify bottlenecks, and ensure optimal performance throughout the life cycle of your data pipelines.
Unravel’s AI-powered analysis automatically provides deep, actionable insights.
Next, let’s look into what key benefits are provided by the Unravel integration into your DevOps workflows.
Achieve operational excellence
Unravel’s CI/CD integration for Databricks enhances data team and developer efficiency by seamlessly providing real-time, AI-powered insights to help optimize performance and troubleshoot issues in your data pipelines.
Unravel integrates with your favorite CI/CD tools such as Azure DevOps and GitHub. When developers make changes to code and submit via a pull request, Unravel automatically conducts AI-powered checks to ensure the code is performant and efficient. This helps developers:
- Maximize resource utilization by gaining valuable insights into pipeline efficiency
- Achieve performance and cost goals by analyzing critical metrics during development
- Leverage specific, actionable recommendations to improve code for cost and performance optimization
- Identify and resolve bottlenecks promptly, reducing development time
Leverage developer pull request (PR) reviews
Developers play a crucial role in achieving cost efficiency through PR reviews. Encourage them to adopt best practices and follow established guidelines when submitting code for review. This ensures that all tests are run and results are thoroughly evaluated before merging into the main project branch.
By actively involving developers in the review process, you tap into their knowledge and experience to identify potential areas for cost savings within your pipelines. Their insights can help streamline workflows, improve resource allocation, and eliminate inefficiencies. Involving developers in PR reviews fosters collaboration among team members and encourages feedback, creating a culture of continuous improvement.
Here are several ways developer PR reviews can enhance the reliability of data pipelines:
- Ensure code quality: Developer PR reviews serve as an effective mechanism to maintain high code-quality standards. Through these reviews, developers can catch coding errors, identify potential bugs, and suggest improvements before the code is merged into the production repository.
- Detect issues early: By involving developers in PR reviews, you ensure that potential issues are identified early in the development process. This allows for prompt resolution and prevents problems from propagating further down the pipeline.
- Mitigate risks: Faulty or inefficient code changes can have significant impacts on your pipelines and overall system stability. With developer PR reviews, you involve experts who understand the intricacies of the pipeline and can help mitigate risks by providing valuable insights and suggestions.
- Foster a collaborative environment: Developer PR reviews create a collaborative environment where team members actively engage with one another’s work. Feedback provided during these reviews promotes knowledge sharing, improves individual skills, and enhances overall team performance.
Real-world examples of CI/CD integration for Databricks
Companies in finance, healthcare, e-commerce, and more have successfully implemented CI/CD practices with Databricks. Enterprise organization across industries leverage Unravel to ensure that code is performant and efficient before it goes into production.
- Financial services: A Fortune Global 500 bank provides Unravel to their developers as a way to evaluate their pipelines before they do a code release.
- Healthcare: One of the largest health insurance providers in the United States uses Unravel to ensure that its business-critical data applications are optimized for performance, reliability, and cost in its development environment—before they go live in production.
- Logistics: One of the world’s largest logistics companies leverages Unravel to upskill their data teams at scale. They put Unravel in their CI/CD process to ensure that all code and queries are reviewed to ensure they meet the desired quality and efficiency bar before they go into production.
Check it out!
Unravel CI/CD integration for Databricks use cases
Incorporating Unravel’s real-time, AI insights into PR reviews helps developers ensure the reliability, performance, and cost efficiency of data pipelines before they go into production. This practice ensures that any code changes are thoroughly reviewed before being merged into the main project branch. By catching potential issues early on, you can prevent pipeline breaks, bottlenecks, and wasted compute tasks from running in production.
Ensure pipeline reliability
Unravel’s purpose-built AI helps augment your PR reviews to ensure code quality and reliability in your release pipelines. Unravel integration into your Databricks CI/CD process helps developers identify potential issues early on and mitigate risks associated with faulty or inefficient code changes. Catching breaking changes in development and test environments helps developers improve productivity and helps ensure that you achieve your SLAs.
1-minute tour: Unravel’s AI-powered Speed, Cost, Reliability Optimizer
Achieve cost efficiency
Unravel provides immediate feedback and recommendations to improve cost efficiency. This enables you to catch inefficient code, and developers can make any necessary adjustments for optimal resource utilization before it impacts production environments. Using Unravel as part of PR reviews helps your organization optimize resource allocation and reduce cloud waste.
1-minute tour: Unravel’s AI-powered Databricks Cost Optimization
Boost pipeline performance
Collaborative code reviews provide an opportunity to identify bottlenecks, optimize code, and enhance data processing efficiency. By including Unravel’s AI recommendations in the review process, developers benefit from AI-powered insights to ensure code changes achieve performance objectives.
1-minute tour: Unravel’s AI-powered Pipeline Bottleneck Analysis
Get started with Unravel CI/CD integration for Databricks
Supercharge your CI/CD process for Databricks using Unravel’s AI. By leveraging this powerful combination, you can significantly improve developer productivity, ensure pipeline reliability, achieve cost efficiency, and boost overall pipeline performance. Whether you choose to automate PR reviews with Azure DevOps or GitHub, Unravel’s CI/CD integration for Databricks has got you covered.
Now it’s time to take action and unleash the full potential of your Databricks environment. Integrate Unravel’s CI/CD solution into your workflow and experience the benefits firsthand. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to streamline your development process, save costs, and deliver high-quality code faster than ever before.