Over the past decade, businesses have migrated to the cloud for its simplicity, elasticity, and resilience. Cloud ecosystems offer a variety of computing and storage options, enabling customers to choose configurations that maximize productivity. However, determining the right configuration to minimize cost while maximizing performance is challenging, as workloads vary and cloud offerings constantly evolve. Many businesses are overwhelmed with choice overload and often end up making suboptimal choices that lead to inflated cloud spending and/or poor performance.In this paper, we describe INFA-FinOps, an automated system that helps Informatica customers strike a balance between cost efficiency and meeting SLAs for Informatica Advanced Data Integration (aka CDI-E) workloads. We first describe common workload patterns observed in CDI-E customers and show how INFA-FinOps selects optimal cloud resources and configurations for each workload, adjusting them as workloads and cloud ecosystems change. It also makes recommendations for actions that require user review or input. Finally, we present performance benchmarks on various enterprise use cases and conclude with lessons learned and potential future enhancements.

We live in the gilded age of data-driven computing. With public clouds offering virtually unlimited amounts of compute and storage, enterprises collecting data about every aspect of their businesses, and advances in analytics and machine learning technologies, data driven decision making is now timely, cost-effective, and therefore, pervasive. Alas, only a handful of power users can wield today's powerful data engineering tools. For one thing, most solutions require knowledge of specific programming interfaces or libraries. Furthermore, running them requires complex configurations and knowledge of the underlying cloud for cost-effectiveness. We decided that a fundamental redesign is in order to democratize data engineering for the masses at cloud scale. The result is Informatica Cloud Data Integration - Elastic (CDI-E). Since the early 1990s, Informatica has been a pioneer and industry leader in building no-code data engineering tools. Non-experts can express complex data engineering tasks using a graphical user interface (GUI). Informatica CDI-E is built to incorporate the simplicity of GUI in the design layer with an elastic and highly scalable run time to handle data in any format without little to no user input using automated optimizations. Users upload their data to the cloud in any format and can immediately use them in conjunction with their data management and analytic tools of choice using CDI-E GUI. Implementation began in the Spring of 2017, and Informatica CDI-E has been generally available since the Summer of 2019. Today, CDI-E is used in production by a growing number of small and large enterprises to make sense of data in arbitrary formats. In this paper, we describe the architecture of Informatica CDI-E and its novel no-code data engineering interface. The paper highlights some of the key features of CDI-E: simplicity without loss in productivity and extreme elasticity. It concludes with lessons we learned and an outlook of the future.

We study the problem of landuse characterization at the urban-object level using deep learning algorithms. Traditionally, this task is performed by surveys or manual photo interpretation, which are expensive and difficult to update regularly. We seek to characterize usages at the single object level and to differentiate classes such as educational institutes, hospitals and religious places by visual cues contained in side-view pictures from Google Street View (GSV). These pictures provide geo-referenced information not only about the material composition of the objects but also about their actual usage, which otherwise is difficult to capture using other classical sources of data such as aerial imagery. Since the GSV database is regularly updated, this allows to consequently update the landuse maps, at lower costs than those of authoritative surveys. Because every urban-object is imaged from a number of viewpoints with street-level pictures, we propose a deep-learning based architecture that accepts arbitrary number of GSV pictures to predict the fine-grained landuse classes at the object level. These classes are taken from OpenStreetMap. A quantitative evaluation of the area of Île-de-France, France shows that our model outperforms other deep learning-based methods, making it a suitable alternative to manual landuse characterization.

We aim to jointly estimate height and semantically label monocular aerial images. These two tasks are traditionally addressed separately in remote sensing, despite their strong correlation. Therefore, a model learning both height and classes jointly seems advantageous and so, we propose a multitask Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture with two losses: one performing semantic labeling, and another predicting normalized Digital Surface Model (nDSM) from the pixel values. Since the nDSM/height information is used only in the second loss, there is no need to have a nDSM map at test time, and the model can estimate height automatically on new images. We test our proposed method on a set of sub-decimeter resolution images and show that our model equals the performances of two separate models, but at the cost of a single one.