With CI/CD becoming more and more the defining competitive edge in the marketplace, the big question is how, exactly, does one accomplish continuous delivery? On this episode of The New Stack Makers, we sat down with Jack Norris, to talk about a big piece of that puzzle. He’s senior vice president at MapR, a company that provides a data fabric layer to the tech stack necessary for continuous delivery.

The concept of a data fabric, which allows data to flow seamlessly across all locations whether its databases or along the edge, is a fundamentally different architecture, Norris said. Back in 2008, when MapR was created, it represented a paradigm shift in thinking about data. Traditionally, the application dictated how the data must be organized and you ended up separate application stacks and data silos.

In today’s world of continuous delivery and speed of application use, data is a big pressure point, said Norris. A data fabric is an alternative to these separate silos.

The fabric contains multiple types of data, supports different types of workloads, stretches across locations globally, and provides easy access to data on premise, in the cloud, or all the way to the edge, he said.