In this talk, we provide an introduction to Luigi via real life case studies showing you how you can break large, multi-step data processing task into a graph of smaller sub-tasks that are aware of the state of their interdependencies.

Growth Intelligence tracks the performance and activity of all the companies in the UK economy using their data ‘footprint’. This involves tracking numerous unstructured data points from multiple sources in a variety of formats and transforming them into a standardised feature set we can use for building predictive models for our clients.

In the past, this data was collected by in a somewhat haphazard fashion: combining manual effort, ad hoc scripting and processing which was difficult to maintain. In order to streamline the data flows, we’re using an open-source Python framework from Spotify called Luigi. Luigi was created for managing task dependencies, monitoring the progress of the data pipeline and providing frameworks for common batch processing tasks.