Tuesday Feb 20, 2024

Data Dreams and AI Realities with Premal Shah

In this engaging episode, host Madhukar Kumar dives deep into the world of data architecture, deployment processes, machine learning, and AI with special guest Premal Shah, the Co-Founder and Head of Engineering at 6sense. Join them as Premal traces the technological evolution of Sixth Sense, from the early use of FTP to the current focus on streamlining features like GitHub Copilot and enhancing customer interactions with GenAI.

Discover the journey through the adoption of Hive and Spark for big data processing, the implementation of microservice architecture, and massive-scale containerization. Learn about the team's cutting-edge projects and how they prioritize product development based on data value considerations.

Premal also shares valuable advice for budding engineers looking to enter the field. Whether you're a tech enthusiast or an aspiring engineer, this episode provides fascinating insights into the ever-evolving landscape of technology!

Key Quotes:

“What is important for our customers, is that 6sense gives them the right insight and gives them the insight very quickly. So we have a lot of different products where people come in and they infer the data from what we're showing. Now it is our responsibility to help them do that faster. So now we are bringing in GenAI to give them the right summary to help them to ask questions of the data right from within the product without having to think about it more or like open a support ticket or like ask their CSM.”
“We had to basically build a platform that would get all of our customer's data on a daily basis or hourly basis and process it every day and give them insights on top of it. So, we had some experience with Hadoop and Hive at that time. So we used that platform as like our big data platform and then we used MySQL as our metadata layer to store things like who is the customer, what products are there, who are the users, et cetera. So there was a clear separation of small data and big data.”
“Pretty soon we realized that the world is moving to microservices, we need to make it easy for our developers to build and deploy stuff in the microservice environment. So, we started investing in containerization and figuring out, how we could deploy it, and at that same time Kubernetes was coming in so with using docker and Kubernetes we were able to blow up our monolith into microservices and a lot of them. Now each team is responsible for their own service and scaling and managing and building and deploying the service. So the confluence of technologies and what you can foresee as being a challenge has really helped in making the transition to microservices.”
“We brought in like SingleStore to say, ‘let's just move all of our UIs to one data lake and everybody gets a consistent view.’ There's only one copy. So we process everything on our hive and spark ecosystem, and then we take the subset of the process data, move it to SingleStore, and that's the customer's access point.”
“We generally coordinate our releases around a particular time of the month, especially for the big features, things go behind feature flags. So not every customer immediately gets it. You know, some things go in beta, some things go in direct to production. So there are different phases for different features. Then we have like test environments that we have set up, so we can simulate as much as possible, uh, for the different integrations. Somebody has Salesforce, somebody has Mercado, Eloqua, HubSpot. All those environments can be like tested. ”
“A full stack person is pretty important these days. You should be able to understand the concepts of data and storage and at least the basics. Have a backing database to build an application on top of it, able to write some backend APIs, backend code, and then build a decent looking UI on top of it. That actually gives you an idea of what is involved end to end in building an application. Versus being just focused on I only do X versus Y. You need the versatility. A lot of employers are looking for that.”

Timestamps

(00:23) Premal’s Background and Journey into Engineering

(06:37) Introduction to 6sense: The Company and Its Mission

(09:15) The Evolution of 6sense: From Idea to Reality

(13:07) The Technical Aspects: Data Management and Infrastructure

(18:03) Shifting to a micro-service-focused world

(31:16) Challenges of Data Management and Scaling

(38:26) Deployment Strategies in Large-Scale Systems

(47:49) The Impact of Generative AI on Development and Deployment

(55:18) The Future of AI in Engineering

(01:01:07) Quick Hits

Links