Open-sourcing Datanymizer: in-flight template-driven data anonymization

Fakers, anonymizers, and obfuscators — there are various free and open-source data anonymization tools that have been around for a long time and work pretty well, so why did we create a new one? The one that supports globals, uniqueness constraints, inline rules, and other cool features.

We had some particular requirements we wanted our tool to meet. We didn't want the anonymizer to take a "raw" dump and mutate it. Instead, we needed to provide an already anonymized dump, without access to real data. The configuration that determined how the real system data would be anonymized should have been kept separate from that data.

We also wanted a tool that was flexible about how the anonymization itself takes place, ideally allowing the use of templates to populate field contents.