This is where the theory becomes reality. You will integrate the entire stack to build a resilient, scalable, and automated data ecosystem.
1The Project Architecture
The capstone focuses on a Lambda-style architecture. You will implement a Speed Layer using Kafka and Spark Structured Streaming for immediate analytics, and a Batch Layer that moves raw data into a Data Lake for deep historical training. This multi-tiered approach ensures that your AI platform is both responsive to live events and capable of long-term learning.
Project_Blueprint:
Source: [KAFKA: telemetry_stream]
Compute: [SPARK: cleanup_job]
Storage_1: [S3: raw_zone]
Storage_2: [SNOWFLAKE: analytics_schema]
Control: [AIRFLOW: capstone_dag]
Status: ARCHITECTURE_VALIDATED2Hardening the Pipeline
A production pipeline must handle more than just the happy path. In this project, you will implement Dead Letter Queues (for corrupted messages), Automatic Retries in Airflow (for network blips), and Schema Validation (to prevent downstream model failure). These 'Defensive Engineering' practices are what separate a hobbyist from a professional Data Engineer.
# Telemetry Producer
for event in telemetry_source:
producer.send('telemetry', key=event.user_id, value=event.data)
Status: INGESTION_ACTIVE