Proposal: Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) for Palantir Foundry Ontology Management
Tags: summer-2024-planning #foundry
Context and Use Case
As organizations increasingly adopt DevOps and automation practices, there’s a growing need for Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) approaches in all aspects of data management and analytics platforms. This proposal suggests implementing an IaC approach for ontology management in Palantir Foundry.
The key distinction of IaC is its declarative nature: you define what the final infrastructure (in this case, the ontology) should look like, and the IaC tool figures out how to achieve that state. This is similar to how tools like Terraform or AWS CloudFormation work for cloud infrastructure.
The use case involves managing complex, rapidly evolving ontologies across multiple environments (development, staging, production) and potentially across different clients or projects. The aims are to:
- Define ontologies declaratively, specifying the desired end-state
- Automate the process of achieving and maintaining that desired state
- Enhance version control and collaboration using standard DevOps tools and practices
- Enable rapid, consistent deployment and rollback of ontology changes across environments
- Integrate ontology management fully into CI/CD pipelines
Proposed Improvement
An IaC approach for ontology management would offer several advantages:
- Allow defining the desired end-state of the ontology, rather than specifying step-by-step changes.
- Automatically determine the most efficient way to transition between ontology states.
- Enhance integration with standard DevOps tools and workflows through a declarative approach.
- Simplify achieving consistency across environments.
- Enable seamless automation of ontology management within CI/CD pipelines.
Impact and Benefits
Implementing an IaC approach for ontology management would make a significant difference:
-
Declarative Definition: Allows teams to specify the desired ontology structure without worrying about the specific steps to achieve it.
-
Efficiency: The IaC tool would automatically determine the most efficient way to transition the ontology to the desired state, potentially reducing update times significantly.
-
Consistency: Ensures consistent application of changes across all environments by defining the desired state once and applying it everywhere.
-
Enhanced Version Control: Declarative definitions in standard formats (e.g., YAML, JSON) would integrate seamlessly with existing version control systems and DevOps practices.
-
Collaboration: Team members can collaborate more effectively using familiar Git workflows, including code reviews for ontology changes.
-
CI/CD Integration: Ontology updates can be fully integrated into existing CI/CD pipelines, allowing for automated testing and deployment of changes.
-
Scalability: As ontologies grow in complexity, a declarative IaC approach becomes increasingly valuable, allowing for management of even the most intricate data models.
-
Auditability: With changes tracked as declarative statements, it becomes even easier to audit and understand ontology evolution over time.
-
Knowledge Transfer: Declarative ontology definitions serve as clear, self-documenting representations of the data model.
Implementing an IaC approach for ontology management would enhance Palantir Foundry’s already excellent capabilities. This addition would further streamline workflows for organizations with mature automation practices and those dealing with complex, rapidly evolving data models.