Wolt Finds their Perfect-Fit Metadata Platform

Note: This story was originally published February 2022.

Challenge

Wolt, a leading food delivery platform operating across Europe and Asia, faced a critical need for metadata management and data lineage tracking. 

“We knew basically at that point already that we needed something to keep track of our metadata. And lineage was maybe the thing I was most interested in.”

 — Fredrik Sannholm, Staff Engineer (Data Infrastructure), Wolt

Initial attempts to deploy an open source solution proved frustrating. “You do what you do and start Googling ‘open source lineage tool’ and really nothing came up at that point of time,” Sannholm recalls. 

After finding a less modern open source solution that seemed viable, Wolt ran into a wall.

 “I begged my colleague, our team lead for the platform, and got a DevOps engineer to help me out to deploy it and probably spent like a month on that thing and got absolutely nowhere.”

 — Fredrik Sannholm, Staff Engineer (Data Infrastructure), Wolt

Wolt needed a metadata management and lineage tracking solution that was easy to deploy and purpose-built for modern data teams.

Solution

In a second evaluation, Wolt discovered DataHub. The team found it addressed their core requirements while offering significant advantages over their previous attempt, including:

• Easy deployment with clear documentation
• Modern tech stack compatibility (Kafka, Kubernetes, etc.)
• End-to-end lineage tracking
• Responsive open source community

“The DataHub community is really extraordinary. And I have to be honest, I’m not trying to sell this to anyone, but it’s really one of a kind in my opinion.”

— Fredrik Sannholm, Staff Engineer (Data Infrastructure), Wolt

The implementation proved successful, with Sannholm noting, “It’s been a success story ever since.”

Impact

With DataHub, Wolt soon realized benefits across compliance, discoverability, and data quality.

Key benefits included:

• Enhanced legal compliance by tracking sensitive data flows across third-party systems, giving the legal team full visibility
• Improved data discoverability through a centralized catalog that provides transparency into data sources, processing, and usage patterns
• Accelerated onboarding through easily searchable metadata and clear text explanations for all Snowflake warehouse columns, reducing time-to-productivity for data team members
• Automated data quality monitoring by integrating DataHub’s metadata and lineage information to identify data owners, processing jobs, and downstream impacts