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Dagster: A New Programming Model for Data Processing

Nick Schrock Nick Schrock | Founder & CTO | Dagster Labs

This talk would introduce Dagster, an open source framework for building and modeling data processing computations. Data processing systems typically span multiple runtime, storage, tooling, and organizational boundaries. But all the stages in a data processing system share a fundamental property: They are directed, acyclic graphs (DAGs) of functional computations that consume and produce data assets. Dagster defines a standard for containerizing, describing and operating these computations, and that standard is opinionated and informed by the best practices in the industry leading to more testable, more reliable, better structured data systems.

By defining a standard one can build these computations in tools that users know and love such as Jupyter Notebooks (via Papermill), Dbt, Spark and leverage that standard in order to build high quality developer- and ops-facing tools to inspect, operate, and monitor those computations. These tools range from our beautiful introspection and execution tool Dagit, to tools that schedule these computations on systems ranging from Airflow to Lambda, among others. Dagster embraces the chaotic reality of the modern data management, and is an abstraction designed for incremental adoption within an increasingly heterogenous ecosystem. We would describe both the technology and the technical and organizational insights gained by production use of Dagster.

Nick Schrock
Nick Schrock
Founder & CTO | Dagster Labs

Nick Schrock is the founder and CEO of Elementl, the company behind Dagster. Previously, Nick worked at Facebook, where he co-created GraphQL. Nick believes deeply in the power of well-designed developer tools to make engineers more productive, accelerate their careers, make their lives more enjoyable, and transform the organizations in which they work.

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