What is Sidra Data & AI Platform¶

Sidra Data & AI Platform is a fully modular, extensible platform built on Azure technologies to deliver the fastest path from raw data to governed, actionable insight. It empowers enterprises to deploy governed, domain-oriented, and production-ready data environments in days—enabling Data Products for analytics, machine learning, APIs, and operational intelligence.

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A New Paradigm: Data Platforms, Not Just Data Lakes¶

Sidra isn't just a data lake—it's a foundational framework for building modern data platforms.

From its automated ingestion to its modular services and rich governance, Sidra allows organizations to embrace decentralization without chaos. It decouples raw data ingestion from business logic transformation, enabling teams to own and build with clarity and confidence.

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Enterprise Ready by Design¶

Sidra combines cloud-native scalability with the control and security expected by the enterprise. Built on Azure PaaS, it integrates natively with ADLS Gen2, Databricks, Azure Data Factory, Service Bus, and more. Sidra empowers enterprises by combining robust features and the flexibility to meet specific industry or organizational needs:

• Multi-region Deployment: Use isolated Data Storage Units (DSUs) for global compliance and scalability.
• Secure Access Control: Built-in identity management and fine-grained authorization via Keycloak and Balea.
• Data Quality Enforcement: Automated validation, anomaly detection, and sensitive data (PII) detection ensure trust in data assets.
• API Automation: API Builder automatically generates secure, standardized APIs for your Data Products.
• Event-based Orchestration: Integration Hub streamlines asynchronous communication across Sidra services and Data Products.

Beyond built-in capabilities, Sidra provides extensive SDKs, APIs, and Connector Toolkits. These powerful tools enable partners and customers to easily build bespoke integrations with niche or legacy systems, create new Data Product templates, or even develop custom Sidra services tailored to specific industry needs (e.g., a healthcare-specific FHIR service).

This extensible foundation ensures every customization or integration inherits Sidra’s rigorous standards for security, compliance, and governance, effectively minimizing risks and complexities commonly associated with specialized data projects.

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More Than a Platform: A Delivery Framework¶

With Sidra, you're not just deploying tech. You're deploying methodology:

• Start small and scale fast with pre-built pipelines and templates.
• Keep business and tech aligned by modeling data as Data Products.
• Let each domain own its life-cycle and logic—while sharing the same infrastructure.

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Sidra Core Services¶

Sidra provides a comprehensive suite of core services that enable seamless management, automation, and extensibility:

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Sidra Data Products¶

Sidra Data Products are modular, domain-oriented units that consume data from one or multiple DSUs and transform it into actionable, governed outputs for analytics, machine learning, APIs, or even full-fledged applications.

This concept aligns with the Data as a Product principle at the heart of modern data architectures—including Data Mesh—but without requiring full organizational adoption of the Data Mesh model. Sidra allows you to apply domain-oriented thinking and decentralized ownership incrementally and pragmatically.

Each Data Product in Sidra is:

• Independently owned and deployed, with clear accountability and business logic.
• Secure by default, with scoped access only to the data it needs.
• Deployable across Azure regions, with its own infrastructure, compute, and pipelines.
• Cataloged and discoverable, thanks to integration with the Data Catalog Service.

Built-in Templates and Custom Toolkit¶

Sidra includes predefined templates for common scenarios: - BI models and dashboards (e.g., Data Warehousing, Power BI, embedded visuals) - ML models and pipelines (e.g., Databricks notebooks, Exploratory Analysis Environments, MLFlow) - Operational APIs (e.g., auto-generated REST/GraphQL services)

For more advanced or industry-specific use cases, Sidra provides a Data Product Toolkit that enables partners and customers to: - Build and package custom Data Product templates - Define infrastructure, metadata, and behavior declaratively - Reuse security, observability, and integration patterns from the platform

CI/CD and Lifecycle Automation¶

Data Products can be versioned and deployed via Sidra's CI/CD pipelines, allowing teams to: - Automate provisioning and updates - Embed tests and validation steps - Promote Data Products across environments in a controlled and auditable way

This makes Data Products not only technically isolated but also lifecycle managed—ideal for enterprise environments with evolving governance needs.

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Cross-Cutting Capabilities¶

Sidra offers foundational capabilities across Connectors, Services, and Data Products to ensure consistency, observability, and governance across domains:

• Automated Pipelines: Ingest at scale through metadata-driven pipeline generation.
• Audit & Lineage: Comprehensive traceability of data flow, transformations, and operations.
• Low Latency & Real-time: Support for near real-time ingestion and data delivery.
• Monitoring Dashboards: Visibility via Power BI and Log Analytics, enabling infrastructure and data pipeline observability.
• Sidra Web: A visual management interface to operate the platform—create and manage DIPs, deploy and configure Data Products, browse the Data Catalog, and monitor platform activity.