Configuring Ascend for the first time

Before you can start building in your Instance, you will need to set up the resources below.

🔐 Secrets Vaults

In order to store secrets for the systems you will connect to from Ascend, you will need a vault. Ascend will integrate with the vault and be able to access secrets to use when running flows. You will need a separate vault for your Instance and each of your Ascend Environments. This allows you to manage access to specific secrets for each Environment, like development, staging, and production.

➡️ Follow this guide to set up your vaults: Create your Instance Vaults and Create your Environment Vaults.

🏛️ An Instance Store

Your Instance Store is a database or warehouse where you will store metadata relating to your entire instance. This includes data such as logs, events, and statistics. Data ingested and processed as part of your Ascend Data Flows will not be stored in the Instance Store. Ascend currently supports Snowflake and BigQuery as Instance Stores.

➡️ Follow this guide to set up your instance store: Create your Instance Store.

🌐 Data Plane Environment

An environment is a logical boundary that separates access to Ascend resources based on the environment type, like development, staging, and production. This boundary allows you to separate access to these resources. Your Environment Data Plane is the warehouse or database where your data is stored and processed as part of your Ascend Flows.

➡️ Follow this guide to set up your Data Plane environment: Create your Data Plane Environment.

Instances vs. Environments

While the two terms are related, understanding the difference between your Ascend Instance and Environments is important.

• An Ascend Instance is a deployment of the Ascend platform that is a single tenant. It is the top-level entity that contains all of the resources for your instance.
• An Environment is a logical boundary that separates access to resources, like vaults, based on the environment type. Your Ascend Instance will have multiple environments, like development, staging, and production. When setting up an Ascend Workspace, you will define which environment the flows of that workspace will run in.

To learn more, check out information on Ascend Architecture.

🚀 Project

You Ascend Project is a grouping of individual Ascend Flows, and the configuration required to run them. Your Project will be stored as a directory in your Git Repository, and will contain the following sub-directories:

• flows: This is where you will store your actual flow definitions. Each flow contains a components folder that stores component files. Components represent each step of your data pipelines such as ingestion, transformation, and writing out data. These files are written in YAML, SQL, or Python depending on their function.
• vaults: This is where you configure your Environment Vaults.
• connections: This is where you will store configuration for any connections to systems outside of Ascend, including your Data Plane connection.
• profiles: This is where you will store your Profile configurations. Profiles are used to define the parameters and Data Plane with which your flows will run.

➡️ Follow our guide to set up your Ascend Project: Create your Ascend Project.

💾 Git Repository

You Git Repository is where you will store and manage your Ascend Projects. This allows you to maintain the history of your project as well as carry out CI/CD and version control on your Ascend Project. You may choose to bring your own Git Repository or use an Ascend-managed Git Repository.

➡️ Follow this guide to set up your own git repository: Create your Git Repository.

🧑‍💻Workspace

Your Workspace is a development environment where you can build and run your flows. Workspaces allow multiple developers to work on the same flow without interfering with each other, as each workspace has its own branch of the repository.

➡️ Follow this guide to set up your workspace: Create your Workspace.

Next Steps

Once you have set up your Instance, you are ready to start building your first flow in our Quickstart Guide 🚀