Process Isolation in Data Pipelines

Process isolation is a crucial aspect of software engineering that ensures data pipelines remain secure and reliable by partitioning memory space and computational resources used in each process. This prevents interference between different applications or instances of the same application, guaranteeing that one process cannot write to or read from another. In the context of data pipelines and integration, process isolation means that every data connector for every customer is separated at a low level, ensuring utmost security and reliability. Process isolation guarantees security in two ways: by preventing data mix-ups between different customers using the same machine and by offering security from the standpoint of data governance. It also promotes reliability by isolating crashes resulting from bugs or memory shortages to a single instance, without affecting others. However, challenges posed by process isolation include determining the correct allocation of memory due to unpredictable data sync sizes and the need for wasteful over-allocation of memory to ensure that syncs virtually always succeed.