Architecting for change: LinkedIn's new data ecosystem

Shirshanka Das and Yael Garten describe how LinkedIn redesigned its data analytics ecosystem in the face of a significant product rewrite, covering the infrastructure changes, such as client-side activity tracking, a unified reporting platform, and data virtualization techniques to simplify migration, that enable LinkedIn to roll out future product innovations with minimal downstream impact.

Last year, LinkedIn embarked on an ambitious mission to completely revamp the mobile experience for its members. This would mean a completely new mobile application, reimagined user experiences, and new interaction concepts. As the team evaluated the impact of this big rewrite on the data analytics ecosystem, they observed a few problems. Over the past few years, LinkedIn has become extremely good at incrementally changing the site one mini-feature at a time, often in conjunction with hundreds of other incremental changes. LinkedIn’s experimentation platform ensures that it is always monitoring a wide gamut of impacted metrics with every change before rolling fully forward. However, when it comes to rolling out a big change like this, different challenges crop up. You have to rollout the entire application all at once; the new experience means that you have no baseline on new metrics; and existing metrics may see double digit changes just because of the new experience or because the metric’s logic is no longer accurate—the challenge is in figuring out which is which. Shirshanka Das and Yael Garten describe how LinkedIn redesigned its data analytics ecosystem in the face of a significant product rewrite, covering the infrastructure changes that enable LinkedIn to roll out future product innovations with minimal downstream impact. Shirshanka and Yael explore the motivations and the building blocks for this reimagined data analytics ecosystem, the technical details of LinkedIn’s new client-side tracking infrastructure, its unified reporting platform, and its data virtualization layer on top of Hadoop and share lessons learned from data producers and consumers that are participating in this governance model. Along the way, they offer some anecdotal evidence during the rollout that validated some of their decisions and are also shaping the future roadmap of these efforts.