Apache Iceberg with Unity Catalog at HelloFresh

Table formats like Delta Lake and Iceberg have been game changers for pushing lakehouse architecture into modern Enterprises. The acquisition of Tabular added Iceberg to the Databricks ecosystem, an open format that was already well supported by processing engines across the industry. At HelloFresh we are building a lakehouse architecture that integrates many touchpoints and technologies all across the organization. As such we chose Iceberg as the table format to bridge the gaps in our decentralized managed tech landscape. We are leveraging Unity Catalog as the Iceberg REST catalog of choice for storing metadata and managing tables. In this talk we will outline our architectural setup between Databricks, Spark, Flink and Snowflake and will explain the native Unity Iceberg REST catalog, as well as catalog federation towards connected engines. We will highlight the impact on our business and discuss the advantages and lessons learned from our early adopter experience.