Ever inherited a data platform where nobody knows how schemas evolved, configurations vanish after migrations, and 500+ models have no lineage? While software development embraced DevOps years ago, data engineering got left behind - stuck with clickops, tribal knowledge, and the dangerous myth that "we'll automate later." We rebuilt our data platforms with a code-first approach using Terraform, dbt, and GitOps, achieving an 80% reduction in manual work and transforming unreliable deployments into boring, repeatable operations. Here's why if it's not in code, it doesn't exist - and why that principle saved our infrastructure.

What if you could drop any PDF into a folder and get back a clean, structured summary — powered entirely by open-source tools and your own local AI? This workflow turns document chaos into automated clarity.

Learn how to set up comprehensive monitoring for your self-hosted Dagster deployment using Prometheus, from infrastructure metrics to custom asset instrumentation.

Learn how to monitor dbt SQL transformations in Dagster using Prometheus. This complete guide shows you how to extract metrics from dbt artifacts and integrate them with your existing observability stack.

The combination of open-source tools like Authentik with Kubernetes ingress controllers provides enterprise-grade authentication without the enterprise price tag, making secure self-hosted data stacks accessible to organizations of any size.

Enter GitOps - a modern operations model where desired state lives in version control, and automation reconciles it to reality. In software engineering, GitOps is already the go-to for managing microservices. But it’s just as powerful for managing pipelines.