It's not the size of your cluster, it's how you use it

1. It's Not the Size of Your Cluster, It's How You Use
It
David Darden – Director of BI Engineering
Don Smith – BI Manager

2. Agenda
• About Us
• How We Pitched the Initial Investment
• How We Structured the Team
• How We Approached the Initial Build Out
• Q & A

3. About Us

4. About Us
• Big Fish Business Intelligence Engineering Team
• World's largest producer and distributor of casual games
• Big Fish has distributed more than 2.5 billion games to customers in more than 150
countries
• Small, agile, business focused
• Owners of the Enterprise Data Warehouse
David Darden
david.darden@bigfishgames.com
Don Smith
don.smith@bigfishgames.com

5. Gummy Drop

6. High Level Goals
• Provide the right data to the right people at the right time
• Deliver business value fast
• Give people the tools they need to do their job
• Minimize reliance on engineering
Business intelligence (BI) is the set of techniques and tools
for the transformation of raw data
into meaningful and useful information
for business analysis

7. Major Use Cases
Landing Zone Offloading
Exploration Awkward data
sets
Big
Data
Volume
Variety
Velocity
Veracity

8. Our Architecture

9. How We Pitched the Initial Investment

10. Where We Started
• Held on to goals tightly, methods loosely
• Let the business need build
• Assessed technology on current/future state
• Used partners

11. What Worked
• Setting up the options
• Focusing on compelling business deliverables
• Iterating over key business problems
• Tying business and technology goals together

12. What We Learned
• What Didn’t Work
– Predicting the future
– Fulfilling all use cases
• Takeaways
– Focus on the business case
– Leverage your partners
– Maintain flexibility

13. How We Structured the Team

14. Where We Started
• Began with little expertise / lots of smart people
• Worked with partners
• Tried to hire experienced engineers

15. What Worked
• Bringing in people with experience
• Pairing and sharing knowledge
• Learning through doing real projects

16. What We Learned
• What Didn’t Work
– Hiring
– Getting people up to speed
– Segmenting the team
• Takeaways
– Use expertise / train internally
– Switch people out judiciously

17. How We Approached the Initial Build Out

18. Where We Started
• Focused on incremental delivery
• Used business projects to address platform projects
• Shared ownership across organization
• Communicated frequently

19. What Worked
• Tackling one-off projects
• Incrementally building systems/showing value
• Transitioning users gradually

20. What We Learned
• What Didn’t Work
– Assuming our old support approach would work
– Underestimating Total Cost of Ownership
– Communicating platform status
• Takeaways
– Leverage your vendor(s)
– Plan for total cost (money and people)
– Prepare for upgrades
– Inspect and adapt frequently

21. Questions?

22. Thank you!
David Darden
david.darden@bigfishgames.com
Don Smith
don.smith@bigfishgames.com