A note on the technology behind Hightouch Events

A note on the technology behind Hightouch Events

There’s a rumor going around that Hightouch Events is a copy of RudderStack. I wanted to make a quick post just to set the facts straight.

There’s 2 core components of event collection:

  1. Server-side infrastructure - This is a highly scalable, high-availability API paired with data pipelines to transform and load data into customers’ data warehouses. This is the core infrastructure of event collection and where the difficult distributed systems and backend engineering problems are.
  2. Client libraries - These are wrappers around the API developed for various programming languages (e.g. JavaScript, Ruby, Python, etc.) and environments (e.g. web, iOS, etc.) that make it easier for product engineers to track events with one line of code instead of having to directly code API calls. The client libraries are offered for developer convenience and are technically not required to collect events into your data warehouse.

Hightouch Events’s server-side infrastructure is not a fork of any open-source technology. It was developed completely in-house. While there’s plenty of open-source prior art, including Rudderstack and Snowplow, we decided to develop this from scratch, as we wanted to pursue a different architecture given our long-term vision for the product and learnings from building similar infrastructure in the past.

Hightouch’s client libraries, however, are a fork of both Segment and Rudderstack’s open-source libraries released under the MIT license. This was done intentionally and publicly. The core reason we forked these libraries is because we see a lot of demand from our customers to migrate from Segment and Rudderstack towards Hightouch and the Composable CDP, and we wanted to make that process a breeze.

For context, this is a common pattern across the CDP space. Many of Rudderstack’s libraries were forked from Segment’s open-source libraries. In addition, other CDPs white-label MetaRouter to power their event collection functionality, and even MetaRouter’s libraries were forked from Segment as well.

Our industry runs on open-source. It’s a part of what makes software great. I’ve been a long time open-source enthusiast myself. It’s how I started my career and joined Segment. We are committed to fully supporting the client libraries, and part of this means making all future enhancements and bug fixes open-source as they should be.

I hope this helps clear things up. If anyone has any questions, feel free to reach out.

— Tejas Manohar

Aditya Thatte

Principal Product Manager | Ex-Snowflake, Teradata, IBM Research | Data sharing, Marketplace, UX

1 年

hi Tejas, nice article! Is your sync engine built off OSS or built in house? I'm guessing the latter given its a server side piece?

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Tim Armstrong

Director - Data, Technology and Product

1 年

I always find these conversations quite peculiar. As someone working client side and often looking for tech vendors who can integrate into our business and solve certain challenges, then tech vendors doing the same thing the same way I see as a positive thing. What I am opposed to is vendors making claims about other vendors or degrading another. If you're in an RFP/selection process then the focus should be on how your tech alone can help the client in question. For any vendor we leverage an angle of thinking where at some point all credible vendors who solve a certain business challenge will have a high proportion of like-for-like features. If not it's only a matter of time until they do.

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Evan Tahler

Engineering & Product Leadership

1 年

That's just called 'interop'!

Jérémy Goillot

CEO @The Mobile-First Company ?? Your Business, in your Pocket | ?? Angel Investor in +40 startups

1 年

Funny to see Rudderstack's team talking about "copycat" ??

Naveen Gupta

Product Management Leader | VP of Product Management | Previously @ Oracle | Reltio | Talend and YellowBrick Data | Advisor | Mentor

1 年

You are being nice Tejas Manohar to clarify this, but you really didn't need to explain, unless the concern is coming from your customers. It's all about "outcomes". As long as that is golden, "who gives a hoot".

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