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Under the hood of Alteryx: tips, tricks and how-tos.
The Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform is an end-to-end enterprise-class data and analytics platform supporting the entire data and analytics lifecycle from ingestion, data preparation, and data enrichment to productionizing and driving business outcomes through business intelligence or predictive modeling. And now, organizations that have chosen Azure as a cloud provider to help them in their digital transformation can leverage the Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform with seamless integrations.
You can learn more about the available applications and features of the Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform here, but this blog will focus on the integration of the Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform and Azure for customers looking to understand how this will complement their technology stack.
Deployment Overview
Data Connectivity
The Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform supports several Microsoft/Azure-based data sources, empowering users with robust data and analytic tooling to uncover insights and drive business outcomes. This includes foundational data sources such as Microsoft SQL Server or Azure SQL, as well as files stored on Azure Data Lake storage. Many organizations also rely on Microsoft 365, and with the Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform, users can work with Microsoft 365 data sources such as SharePoint and OneDrive, which are commonly used as ways to securely share files across the business. Additionally, the Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform works with powerful Cloud Data Warehouse Platforms such as Snowflake and Databricks. When Snowflake or Databricks are also hosted in Azure, strong integration with Alteryx Analytics Cloud allows users not only the ability to read and write data to and from those sources but the Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform can also use the powerful capabilities of these data platforms to execute jobs natively within their processing engines. For Snowflake, this means generating Snowflake-compliant SQL and pushing the processing to execute directly in the Snowflake Warehouse. For Databricks, this includes both integration with Databricks Spark computing clusters or generating Databricks-compliant SQL and pushing the processing to execute directly in the Databricks Warehouse. You can learn more about Alteryx Analytics Cloud’s integration with Databricks here.
Workspaces & Workspace Storage
The Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform is a multi-tenant environment that uses “Workspaces” to provide separation of projects, users, data assets, reports, and predictive models. These Workspaces can be defined by each organization as they see fit, with some common examples being by department, by workstream, or by environment stage (Dev, Test, Prod).
Each Workspace has its own “Workspace Storage,” which is used to store uploaded files, sample data, or data assets you’ve created that you’d like to share with other users across the platform. This Workspace storage is built on Azure Data Lake Store (ADLS) Gen 2. You can find more details on the ADLS workspace storage setup here. When combined with Databricks or Snowflake as a Cloud Data Warehouse, the Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform can efficiently and quickly load data into the warehouse using ADLS workspace storage as a staging location.
Security
Security is top of mind for all IT leaders, and the Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform leverages industry-standard single sign-on (SSO) integration based on SAML 2.0 or OpenID Connect (OIDC). With an Azure deployment, this SSO works by authenticating users to Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory), which is the standard for most organizations using Azure. The process of configuring Single Sign-On is entirely self-service, following the documentation here. Each Workspace can define its own SSO integration and must explicitly “invite” users to be a member of the Workspace for extra security.
In addition, IT admins can define how the workspace will interact with the Azure ADLS-based Workspace Storage by defining the Cloud Authorization for accessing ADLS.
Users authenticated into the Workspace are assigned roles from within the platform, which grant privileges and application access.
Architecture
The Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform features a flexible architecture, giving organizations choices in a deployment model that meets the needs of their business. Alteryx’s full SaaS model allows organizations to work with a cloud platform completely hosted by Alteryx, offering the simplest and fastest way to get up and running. For organizations that desire data samples, uploaded files, and data outputs back to Workspace Storage to all be kept in their Azure cloud environment, organizations can leverage the Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform’s deployment with Private Data Storage (shown below). With this approach, Workspace Storage is a customer-owned Azure ADLS. In this configuration, a customer-owned Databricks environment can also be used for SQL “pushdown” processing or scalable execution using Spark.
For organizations who want more control with a desire that all data is processed within their Azure Subscription or need special requirements to “privately” connect to other Azure or On-Prem data sources, a Private Data Handling deployment model (shown below) is available. This architecture could be chosen to support data sovereignty or regulatory requirements.
In this approach, all job execution, data processing, and data connectivity occur within the customer-owned Azure Subscription defined on the Workspace. Azure ADLS is used for Workspace Storage, and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is used for efficient, scalable, and resilient orchestration of jobs. Optionally, a customer-owned Databricks can still be used for efficient processing of large data volumes using Databricks Spark or Databricks SQL execution.
Conclusion
The Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform provides seamless integration into Azure for organizations that desire to optimize their data and analytics processing with a Microsoft/Azure ecosystem. If you’d like to learn more about how you can take advantage of these integrations, please reach out to your Alteryx sales representative.
