Every example in this book ran on one ordinary machine: a Windows 11 PC with 4 logical CPUs and 32 GB of RAM. All the data tools run inside WSL2 6 (the Windows Subsystem for Linux), in an Ubuntu 26.04 225 LTS distribution, because that is where data engineering tools are built and deployed. Services such as PostgreSQL 1,289 , Kafka 129 , Airflow 129 and Trino 403,499 run as Docker 514 containers inside Ubuntu, Python libraries live in a virtual environment, and DuckDB 61,228 serves as the local analytical database. On Linux, skip the WSL2 step; on a Mac, use Homebrew 6,457 and Docker Desktop 514 .
