At Tower, our goal is to create infrastructure that works well for data engineers. We strive to make Tower and all the tools in your stack easy to use. To help with this, we built the Tower Catalog. It’s a REST catalog for Apache Iceberg tables that is fully managed by Tower. Instead of setting up an external catalog, copying the parameters into Tower, and praying you didn't mistype the settings, you can now start using Iceberg tables in Tower with a few clicks. While the Tower Catalog is in beta, meaning it is not meant for production use, it is perfect for experimentation and development - so go wild!

We’re pairing this release with a new example app, which uses Tower’s storage. We’ve also simplified the app deployment flow, to make the onboarding experience smoother. This combination allows you to run realistic apps that read and write to analytical storage within minutes of logging into Tower. ​

Here is a quick demo of how all of this works.

​In addition to simple “Hello-World” apps, you can now also deploy a more advanced Stock Ticker data acquisition app that works with Iceberg tables. Soon, we’ll make the rest of our example apps deployable as well. If you pick an app that uses an Iceberg lakehouse, we’ll also set up a default Tower Catalog and provide storage in a temporary S3 bucket, so the example runs right away.

Overall, we expect this to make onboarding and using Tower easier. After you try a couple of example apps, try using the other tools we’ve built recently: externally accessible notebooks, running dbt Core models in Tower, the Tower MCP server, etc.

​We’re curious which of the tools you’ve found most useful. You can provide feedback on our support channel or join our Discord and participate in community discussions.