Storyline

Setting up a fictional storyline helps your customer relate the demo activities to a real-world scenario. Read through and familiarize yourself with the following use case and as you run through the demos of each personas, tie back the activities to the challenges each persona faces.

Background

Red Imports LLC (RIL) is a mid-sized privately owned, retailer that specializes in home delivery of the finest luxury imported goods, particularly furniture, table-top items, decorative accessories and seasonal décor. In addition, RIL stocks a wide array of the most popular imported non-perishable food items from around the world. RIL aspires to help customers replicate the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of exotic lands across the globe with just a click. The RIL slogan is: “Bringing the world to your door”

Problems to solve

As part of their ongoing quest for efficiency and agility, RIL has recently retired their on-premise data center and has moved their entire IT environment to AWS. As part of the move to AWS, RIL migrated their data warehouse from Netezza to Redshift. Currently, RIL is in the process of building out their new data lake to further support expansion of their data collection for new AI/ML initiatives.

Red Imports LLC (RIL) is currently expanding their use of data science and AI/ML technologies to help them solve difficult optimization problems.

Architecture

Architecture

Team

RIL prides itself in running an efficient and profitable company, leveraging all the data at their disposal. As such, they have a small team to help them optimize business operations, minimize costs, and maximize profitability. This tight knit group includes:

Name Persona Description
Miguel Data Analyst He is a Data Analyst that spends most of his time working directly with business managers, building reports, answering basic business questions. He has a variety of skills including SQL and a wide range of reporting/BI tools
Marie Data Engineer She is a Data Engineer who spends most of her time ingesting data into the RIL data lake for Miguel and Kim to use. Marie is an expert with Python, Spark, SQL, as well as ETL tools.
Joe DBA He is a DBA who manages and maintains all RIL’s databases and Data warehouses. Database administrators (DBAs) use specialized software to store and organize data. The role may include capacity planning, installation, configuration, database design, performance monitoring, troubleshooting, as well as backup and data recovery.
Kim Data Scientist She is a Data Scientist that spends most of her time combing through the company data looking for business opportunities/optimizations that are hidden within the data itself. She is comfortable with: statistics, machine learning frameworks, data science tools such as R, basic programming in Python, big data tools such as Spark (PySpark/Scala), and SQL. She also is a big fan of Notebooks such as Zeppelin & Jupyter. Most data scientists spend 80 percent of their time finding, cleaning, and reorganizing huge amounts of data.
Rachel Information Security Engineer She is an Information Security Engineer responsible for the security of the services and applications in the cloud, and providing a seamless experience for the business users. She is familiar with security protocols and deals with identity and access management regularly and is tasked with with implementation of Single Sign-On (SSO), SAML, OAUTH, break glass and other access Info Sec mechanisms and protocols. She is tasked with setting up federated single sign-on to Amazon Redshift using Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) and using browser based SAML 2.0 authentication using the web Identity Providers (PingFederate, Okta, AzureAD). She works closely with the Data Engineers to setup authentication for the users through the corporate directory and an Identity provider. She is also responsible for the data security of the Data Lake and how to manage coarse-grain and fine-grain security.
Manhar POC Lead He is a POC Lead and has been tasked to help jump start the creation of AWS data analytics pipeline. His work will results in adoption of AWS Analytics services to improve and modernize Red Imports data analytics solutions. Manhar is a domain expert with the goal to make data-driven decisions for evaluation and take away undifferentiated heavy lifting by automating the setup for simplification and ease of use. He has access to AWS staff for assistance and can rely on a team of experts with various skills like Miguel, Marie, Joe, Kim, and Rachel within Red Imports.
Sumer Data Quality Engineer Sumer is a Data Quality engineer that spends a lot of time thinking about what happens to data when it’s combined and recombined as it makes it’s way through the data information systems at Red Imports LLC. She spends a lot of time profiling data, making sure the data precision on key fields remains accurate, she is concerned about duplicate entries and other data profiling concerns. She is an expert in tools like Data Quality from Informatica, Oracle, Talend, SAS and more. She cleanses data where needed and also performs minor corrections using SQL, PySpark and low-code UI interfaces.