We at Tower believe that the future will see a shift in how data engineers and their internal data customers collaborate. 

Today, it is common for a data engineer to receive requirements from a data analyst or a project manager to build a pipeline that keeps a data asset (e.g., a set of tables in a data warehouse) up to date. 

After the initial implementation of the data pipeline, the data engineer continues maintaining it, reacting to changing schemas of the data source, edits to business logic, or tuning the performance of the pipeline. Every month, there are new pipelines to create, and the old pipelines seldom go away. Data engineers either get frustrated and quit, or they ignore maintenance requests, and old data assets become stale and error-prone.

Not surprisingly, some of our cutting-edge customers, like Taktile, a leading decision intelligence platform for FinTechs, are asking, "Is there a better way?"

Launching support for Teams

Today, we are proud to release our Teams capability, which was designed to support groups of data engineers and their internal customers. 

By creating a team in Tower, you are setting up a group of Tower users to collaboratively develop and execute apps. Each team gets a separate Tower space to deploy/run apps and maintain their runtime environments. Team members can initiate ad-hoc or scheduled runs of apps in a team account, just like they do in their personal accounts. When apps are run, they run in a runtime environment that is the same for every team member, and this means credentials to databases get passed securely to the app code without anyone even noticing it.

With the Tower Teams feature, you can have one person develop and deploy apps while others just run them when needed. Alternatively, you can have a collaborative setup where multiple people contribute to the creation and maintenance of an app.

How to use Teams in Tower

Tower provides an easy way to create and manage teams via our web UI.

The Tower CLI and web UI have been updated to allow you to set the context of your interactions with Tower. From now on, you will work in the context of a team or personal account, and you can easily change this context with just one click. 

In the Tower CLI, two new commands were added to allow you to manage the context.

To set the active team in the CLI, use the tower teams switch command:

$  tower teams switch team-1
Success! Switched to team: Team 1

Use the tower teams list command to see all the teams you are part of and to check which team is active.

$ tower teams list
  Slug            Team Name
-----------------------------------------
  team-1          Team 1
  team-2          Team 2
*  account-123     First Last

* indicates currently active team

The Tower CLI (install it with pip install tower-cli) continues to be the place to deploy your apps to Tower.

After switching to the team you wanted, you can deploy an app to it by using the CLI’s tower deploy command. You can run an app using the tower run command. These two commands are now contextually aware of the active team. 

Just like with apps in your personal account, you will define secrets for the apps used by the team. Runs of team apps will get the team's secrets, not of the user who deployed it or ran it.

For a detailed walk-through on working in teams, check out this guide.

Next steps

If you would like to see the future of collaborative app development, contact the Tower founders about trying our beta.