A Next-Generation, IoT-Enabled Data Lakehouse for a Class I Railroad
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November 04, 2024
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A major Class I railroad engaged FTI Consulting to design and build a next-generation, Internet of Things (“IoT”)-enabled data lakehouse. This version would ultimately replace several large (+1K table) and aging on-premises (“on-prem”) data warehouses with an Amazon Web Services (“AWS”) Athena-based system.
Our Impact
- IoT data on train movements can now be used in business decision-making.
- The railroad now meets its regulatory reporting requirements with full automation instead of the previous labor-intensive manual assembly of reports.
- The railroad could begin transitioning on-prem workloads to the cloud to better meet scaling demands and control on-prem hardware and software costs.
- The newer architecture of the data lakehouse allowed the railroad’s reports to be authored more efficiently, reducing labor costs to build and maintain reports.
Our Role
- FTI Consulting developed a future-state architecture for a new data lakehouse. This design was pressure-tested against the requirements, refined and then prototyped.
- Since most of the company’s systems were on-prem, and little experience with cloud architecture existed, FTI Consulting developed the templates for an AWS design that adopted best practices and could be reused by the client on future projects.
- FTI Consulting built the end-to-end data lakehouse solution using Spark, AWS Glue tables and Athena, which fed PowerBI and other downstream consumers. The entire environment was designed into an AWS cloud development framework for automatic deployment and included fully automated test cases.
- The system was designed with best-practice engineering throughout to scale to petabytes and met rigorous operational and security requirements, including critical infrastructure protection (“CIP”).
Published
November 04, 2024
Key Contacts
Senior Managing Director, Leader of AI & Digital Transformation
Senior Managing Director
Managing Director