Post by ByteByteGo

📦 How Zalando Delivers Real-Time Insights to Its Partner Brands Zalando connects thousands of brands with customers across Europe, supporting a GMV greater than 5 Billion Euros. These sales generate a massive amount of data that helps brands and retailers make better decisions about their products. However, Zalando’s data-sharing ecosystem was fragmented and scattered across SFTP exports, emails, APIs, and dashboards. Many partners needed to hire multiple full-time analysts just to extract and clean their own data, while others struggled with slow interfaces and large-scale downloads of historical data. In truth, the Partners needed something more than just raw data. They wanted analytical-ready datasets that were easy to integrate into their internal tools. This made Zalando’s engineering team rethink its entire data-sharing framework. The answer was Delta Sharing, an open protocol that delivers secure, zero-copy access to live data. Features like granular access control, enterprise security features, and Databricks’ managed implementation made it a natural fit for Zalando’s scale and governance needs. Here’s what Zalando’s engineering team accomplished: 1 - Built a streamlined architecture around Shares, Recipients, and Activation Links. 2 - The Unity Catalog became the single source of truth for metadata and permissions. 3 - Simplified operations and reduced storage complexity. The impact has reduced a ton of manual work for partners while providing them with consistent and reliable access to insights. To see how Zalando moved from fragmented data exports to a unified, governed, and real-time data sharing model for its partners, read the full breakdown: https://lnkd.in/gfAbhyck Supported by our partners building tools for real-time data systems at scale: Conduktor - Real-time data is becoming the backbone of AI systems, but most teams are still running into architectural, privacy, and security gaps. In an independent survey of 200 senior IT and data executives, 83% use streaming to power AI workloads, and 72% report privacy & security issues when scaling AI. 👉 Read the 2025 Data Streaming & AI Report: https://bit.ly/48GEwSw