Melting the ice — How Natural Intelligence simplified a data lake migration to Apache Iceberg
Big Data Blog
This article details Natural Intelligence's (NI) migration from a Hive-based data lake to Apache Iceberg, highlighting a complex but strategic approach to modernizing their data infrastructure.
- Migration motivated by need for flexibility, multi-engine support, and vendor independence
- Developed a hybrid migration strategy with five key elements:
- Hive-to-Iceberg CDC synchronization
- Continuous schema synchronization
- Iceberg-to-Hive reverse CDC
- Snowflake alias management
- Seamless table replacement
- Used AWS services like EventBridge, Lambda, Kafka, and Spark for orchestration
- Achieved zero downtime migration supporting hundreds of pipelines and dashboards
- Established a modern, vendor-neutral data platform enabling future analytics innovation
The migration demonstrates the importance of careful planning, automation, and maintaining business continuity during complex data infrastructure transformations.
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