Overview:

Big data and cloud computing

With the digitalization of almost everything in this world, the amount of data is increasing at an exponential rate. The IT experts soon realized that analysis of this data is not possible with the traditional data analysis tools. Considering this ever-expanding volume of useful data that could be used in a number of ways the IT experts came up with many solutions amongst which the two initiatives are amongst the top. These two are big data and cloud computing.

Big data analysis offers the promise of providing valuable insights of the data that can create competitive advantage, spark new innovations, and drive increased revenues. By carefully analyzing the data we can predict different things about the company. Cloud computing acts as a delivery model for IT services of any company and has the potential to enhance business agility and productivity while enabling greater efficiencies and reducing costs significantly. By storing the data on cloud servers instead of on site IT department you can not only save money but also make sure that your data is safe and secure as the security of these cloud servers is usually in the hands of top IT security companies.

Both technologies continue to thrive. Organizations are now moving beyond questions of what and how to store big data to addressing how to derive meaningful analytics that responds to real business needs. As cloud computing continues to mature, a growing number of enterprises are building efficient cloud environments, and cloud providers continue to expand services and service offerings.

Characteristics and Categories:

Databases for big data:

One of the most important and crucial task that any company has to do is to choose the correct data base for their big data. As the data is increasing more and more companies have emerged to provide data bases for this big. The databases that are designed to handle big data are usually referred to as NoSQL systems and they do not depend on SQL in contrast to the traditional SQL based data systems. The main working principle of all these companies is, however, the same that is to provide an efficient and effective storage to companies and give them ways to extract useful information from their big data. These companies truly help them to build and expand their business by giving them useful data analytics. The most reputed companies among hundreds of others are Cassandra, dynamob, and AWS. These companies not only give you the best data storage options they also make sure that your data is safe and secure and provide you with useful analytics about your data.

Machine Learning in the Cloud:

One of the most interesting features of cloud computing and big data analysis is the machine learning and its integration with AI. The machine learning cloud services make it easier to build sophisticated and large-scale models that can really increase the efficiency and enhance the overall data management of your company’s data. By injecting AI into your business, you can learn truly amazing things about the data analytics.

IoT platforms:

Internet of Things or IoT is also an interesting aspect of big data and cloud computing. Big data and IoT are essentially two sides of the same coin. Big data is more about data whereas IoT is more concerned with the flow of this data and connectivity of different data generating devices. IoT has created a big data flux that must be analyzed in order to get useful analytics from it.

Computation Engines:

Big data is not just about collecting and storing a large amount of data. This data is of no use to us until it gives us useful information and analytics. These computational engines provide excellent scalability to make your data storage more efficient. These engines use parallel and distributed algorithms to analyze the data. Map reduce is one of the best computations engines in the market at the moment.

Big Data on AWS:

Amazon’s AWS provides you one of the most complete and best big data platforms in the world. It provides you a wide variety of options and different services which can help you with your big data needs. With AWS, you get fast and flexible IT solutions and that too at a low cost. It has the ability to process and analyze any type of data regardless of the volume, velocity, and variety of data. The best thing about AWS is that it offers you more than 50 services and hundreds of features are added in these services every year constantly increasing the efficacy of the system. Two of the most famous services offered by AWS is redshift and kinesis.

AWS Redshift:

Amazon Redshift is a fast, efficient and fully managed data warehouse that makes it extremely simple and cost-effective to analyze all your data using standard SQL and your existing Business Intelligence (BI) tools. By allowing you to run complex analytic queries against petabytes of structured data and using sophisticated query optimization on high-performance local disks most results come back in seconds. It is also extremely cost efficient where you can start from as small as $0.25 per hour with no commitments and then gradually increase to petabytes of data for $1,000 per terabyte per year.

The service also includes Redshift Spectrum, which allows you to directly run SQL queries against exabytes of unstructured big data in Amazon S3. You don’t need to load or transform the data, and you can use open data formats which may include CSV, TSV, Parquet, Sequence, and RCFile. The best thing is that Redshift Spectrum automatically scales query and computes capacity based on the data being retrieved, so queries against Amazon S3 run fast and do not depend on data set size.

AWS Kinesis:

Amazon Kinesis Analytics is another great service by Amazon and is one of the easiest ways to process streaming data in real time with standard SQL. The best thing about this service is that you don’t have to learn any new programming languages or processing frameworks. This service allows you to query streaming data or build entire streaming applications using SQL. This makes sure that you can gain actionable insights and respond to your business and more importantly customer needs promptly.

Amazon Kinesis Analytics is a complete service that takes care of everything required to run your queries continuously and the best part is that it scales automatically to match the volume and throughput rate of your incoming data. With Amazon Kinesis Analytics, you only pay for the resources your queries consume which makes it extremely budget friendly and cost efficient. There is no minimum fee or setup cost.