Introduction
Nexa is a data and AI platform by DataReadyAI that you run inside your own cloud account. This section is for the platform team that installs, operates, and secures Nexa — not the analysts and data engineers who use it day to day. Start here to understand what gets deployed, what it depends on, and what to prepare before your first install.
What Nexa is
Section titled “What Nexa is”Nexa ingests raw data, maps it through Raw → Curated → Consumption layers (bronze/silver/gold), generates the pipelines that move data between those layers, and runs agents and agentic automations on top — with governance built in (business glossary, PII tagging, change review, cost tracking). It does not store your data itself: it orchestrates your existing data warehouse (Snowflake or Databricks), where the tables actually live.
For the platform team, the measurable outcome is a single, governed control plane for the whole data lifecycle — source onboarding, pipeline generation, and AI agents — deployed as a set of container images and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) you own and can audit, with no data leaving your environment for DataReadyAI to see.
Where Nexa sits in your stack
Section titled “Where Nexa sits in your stack”Nexa is a control and orchestration layer. It sits between your data sources and your warehouse, and it drives the warehouse rather than replacing it.
Data sources Nexa (in your cloud) Your warehouse ┌──────────────┐ ┌─────────────────────────┐ ┌──────────────────┐ │ Postgres │ │ nexa-web (UI) │ │ Databricks │ │ Kafka │ ──────► │ nexa-backend (API) │ ─────► │ or │ │ S3 / volumes │ │ warehouse APIs │ │ Snowflake │ │ files, apps │ │ agents-api + workers │ │ (Raw/Curated/ │ └──────────────┘ └─────────────────────────┘ │ Consumption) │ runs on your EKS/AKS cluster └──────────────────┘Nexa augments your warehouse and Git/CI rather than replacing them: it generates pipeline code and pushes it through your GitHub repositories, and it executes work as jobs and pipelines in Snowflake or Databricks. It replaces ad-hoc, hand-written ingestion and modeling glue, and the spreadsheets teams otherwise use to track glossary, lineage, and cost.
What deploying it involves
Section titled “What deploying it involves”Nexa is customer-managed. DataReadyAI ships container images (to your registry) plus Terraform/Terragrunt IaC and Kubernetes manifests; your platform team installs and operates it. DataReadyAI provides support but has no standing access to your environment. See Deployment model for the responsibility split.
At a high level you will:
- Provision cloud infrastructure with the supplied IaC — a Kubernetes cluster (Amazon EKS or Azure AKS), a container registry, DNS, a managed Postgres for Nexa’s own metadata, and networking.
- Deploy the Nexa services to the cluster via GitOps (ArgoCD + Kustomize).
- Connect Nexa to your Snowflake or Databricks workspace and to GitHub.
Choose your path
Section titled “Choose your path”| Path | Who it’s for | Where to go |
|---|---|---|
| Evaluate the product | Trying Nexa’s features before committing infra | Platform overview and Quickstart |
| Full install | Platform team standing up a real environment | Prerequisites → Installation |
| Understand the footprint first | Security/architecture reviewers | Reference architecture |
| AWS | Deploying on Amazon EKS | Prerequisites — AWS tab |
| Azure | Deploying on Azure AKS | Prerequisites — Azure tab |
| Snowflake | Warehouse is Snowflake | Prerequisites — Snowflake tab |
| Databricks | Warehouse is Databricks | Prerequisites — Databricks tab |