Solocal turns cloud data into trusted insights for France’s local businesses with OpenMetadata

As Solocal migrated its analytics ecosystem from on-premise systems to Google Cloud and BigQuery, the scale and complexity of its data environment grew quickly. High website traffic, diverse digital products, and deep coverage of small and medium-sized businesses across France generated massive volumes of data. While this data was critical to sales performance and customer intelligence, it became difficult for teams to safely govern and share it with the rest of the business. Solocal needed a way to simplify access without sacrificing control, while creating a shared understanding between data teams and business users.

To bring clarity and structure to its rapidly growing data ecosystem, Solocal adopted OpenMetadata as an open source, self-hosted metadata and governance layer. The open source model gave Solocal full control to deploy, operate, and extend the platform within its existing cloud architecture, while benefiting from a community-driven project shaped by real-world production use. Rather than introducing another closed system, OpenMetadata became a unifying reference layer that connects technical assets to business-facing data products, improving dialogue between data teams and the business. OpenMetadata is deployed in production on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) using Helm, aligning seamlessly with Solocal’s cloud-native strategy. Metadata ingestion is orchestrated through Apache Airflow, stored in MySQL, and indexed in Elasticsearch to power fast search and discovery in the UI. Authentication is handled through Azure SSO, with automated user and team synchronization via LDAP using the OpenMetadata Python SDK. This architecture allows Solocal to scale governance reliably while keeping operations flexible and transparent.

Data is only valuable if it can be understood, trusted, and safely used by the business. By introducing OpenMetadata as a shared governance and discovery layer, Solocal shifted from managing raw infrastructure complexity to enabling business-ready analytics. OpenMetadata helped bridge the gap between high-volume cloud data and everyday decision-making, allowing teams to move faster while maintaining control over access, quality, and context. Rather than overwhelming users with thousands of technical tables, Solocal now presents a simplified, curated view of its data estate. This has strengthened collaboration with business stakeholders, enabling better insights for sales, customer success, and operations.