Orchestrating Real-Time Insights: Weather Data Extraction with The Modern Data Stack

Introduction: 

In today’s data-driven world, the ability to harness real-time data is crucial for making informed decisions. In this home lab workshop, we aim to extract real-time weather data from Pondicherry and Melbourne every 10 minutes. To accomplish this, we’ll leverage a modern data stack comprising various cutting-edge tools and technologies. This hands-on project will provide practical insights into modern data architecture and its components.

High-level architecture diagram:

Tools in Our Modern Data Stack:

  1. Apache Airflow:

    • Purpose: Workflow automation and scheduling.
    • Role: Orchestrating the entire data pipeline, ensuring seamless execution of tasks.

  2. Airbyte:

    • Purpose: Data integration and replication.
    • Role: Facilitating the extraction of weather data from diverse sources and ensuring its uniformity.

  3. PostgresDB:

    • Purpose: Relational database management.
    • Role: Storing structured weather data for easy retrieval and analysis.

  4. Cassandra DB:

    • Purpose: NoSQL database management.
    • Role: Handling large volumes of data with high write and read throughput.

  5. Vault:

    • Purpose: Secret management and data protection.
    • Role: Safeguarding sensitive information such as API keys and credentials.

  6. DBT (Data Build Tool):

    • Purpose: Transforming and modeling data.
    • Role: Enabling analysts to work with structured, clean data for insights.

  7. Kafka:

    • Purpose: Distributed event streaming platform.
    • Role: Facilitating real-time data streaming between different components of the stack.

  8. Spark Structural Streaming:

    • Purpose: Real-time data processing.
    • Role: Performing complex computations on streaming data.

  9. Grafana:

    • Purpose: Data visualization and monitoring.
    • Role: Creating dashboards to visualize weather trends and system performance.

  10. Metabase:

    • Purpose: Business intelligence and analytics.
    • Role: Empowering users to explore and analyze data through a user-friendly interface.

  11. Nginx:

    • Purpose: Web server and reverse proxy server.
    • Role: Securing and optimizing data transmission between components.

  12. Prometheus:

    • Purpose: Monitoring and alerting toolkit.
    • Role: Keeping track of system metrics and ensuring reliability.

  13. Telegram:

    • Purpose: Communication and alerting.
    • Role: Sending notifications and alerts based on predefined conditions.

  14. Minio:

    • Purpose: Object storage.
    • Role: Storing unstructured data such as raw weather data.

  15. Trino:

    • Purpose: Distributed SQL query engine.
    • Role: Enabling users to query and analyze data stored in different databases seamlessly.