Substack iconSubstackSep 2, 2026 ~2 min source read

They Rebuilt Spark in Rust (Sorta): LakeSail’s Rethink of Spark, Data, and AI Pipelines

LakeSail’s CEO Shehab Amin discusses why Spark’s ecosystem remains essential, what changing core technologies like Rust, Apache Arrow, and DataFusion enable, and how existing data pipelines could become the basis for AI pipelines.

Spark Isn't Going Anywhere. So They Rebuilt It in Rust. — Shehab Amin, CEO of LakeSail

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Useful takeaways from this story.

Spark remains central to many organizations, which motivated a compatible reimplementation rather than a replacement.

Rust, Apache Arrow, and DataFusion change the performance and safety profile of data infrastructure and enable new implementation approaches.

LakeSail’s strategic idea: leverage companies’ existing data pipelines as the foundation for AI pipelines, connecting compute, catalogs, and agents.

The useful part

batch, agentic coding, and what happens when AI agents start interacting directly with data and compute. Most importantly, we explore LakeSail's bigger idea: what if the data pipelines companies already have could become the foundation for their AI pipelines? Share Discussion about this video Comments Restacks Data Engineering Central Podcast Long Live the Data Engineer.

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  • — Asian Dad Energy Sep 9 • Daniel Beach Agentic Data Engineering Is Here — But Can It Close the Loop?
  • — Shehab Amin, CEO of LakeSail Data Engineering Central Podcast.
  • Daniel Beach Sep 02, 2026 9 1 1 Share Transcript In this episode, I sit down with Shehab Amin, co-founder and CEO of LakeSail, to talk about what happens when you decide to rebuild one of data engineering's...
  • We talk about why Spark has remained so sticky, what Rust, Apache Arrow, and DataFusion are changing about data infrastructure, and why rebuilding Spark compatibility turned out to be much harder—and more...
  • Talking about Data Engineering news, topics, and general mayhem.

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Details worth keeping

This post is public so feel free to share it. Jul 15 • Daniel Beach The Creator of Pandas on AI, Apache Arrow, and the Future of Software Engineering Jul 8 • Daniel Beach From COBOL to Copilot: 30 Years of Data, BI, and AI with David Langer Jul 1 • Daniel Beach Semantic Layers, Agents, and the Future of Analytics Jun 24 • Daniel Beach Ready for more?

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More context around this story.

Hardly Promethean
Jardo iconJardoSep 29, 2026

Hardly Promethean

Originally appeared on Jardo.dev: Blog . Last week I published What About Rails , a dive into DHH's Rails World keynote. Smarter people than me had interesting things to say about it: You have the most powerful tool you ever had, you have become a 1000x maker, and you can't think of how to make your stack 10x better? J

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