Cloud Advancements for Crunching Big Data Effectively

The expression “big data” is often thrown around in the business and tech world, but what does that really mean? Big data is a term that’s used to describe huge data sets that can be analyzed for trends and patterns in order to make better business decisions.

That may sound easy enough, and although there is extensive research and written information on big data technologies, few companies are actually using big data successfully. Most businesses remain ambitious, knowing they should be employing the technology without actually doing so.

Data continues to come in faster than ever, making it crucial for companies to process it more quickly. Effectively implementing fast processing of data will ensure your company is more up-to-date and relevant, and this is extremely important given how diverse data is becoming — a factor that gives us all the ability to analyze more innovatively.

As cloud computing continues to dominate the production environment, it’s time to take a look into “big data analytics” so you too can recognize how the power of crunching big data is bringing endless competitive advantage to companies.

Combining Big Data and Cloud Computing

Processing frameworks and engines are key components in computing over data within a data system. Although there is no key difference in the definition between “engines” and “frameworks,” it’s important to define these terms separately — consider engines as the component responsible for operating on data while frameworks are typically a set of components that are designed to do the same.

Although systems designed to handle the data lifecycle at this stage are rather complex, they ultimately share very similar goals — to operate over data in order to broaden understanding and surface patterns while gaining insight on complex interactions.

Clouds are considered a beneficial tool by enterprises across the world because they have the ability to harness business intelligence (BI) in big data. Because cloud computing offers scalability, it’s much easier for big data tools and applications, like Cloudera and Hadoop, to function.

Different Types of Programming Frameworks Available

There are several big data tools available, and some of these include:

Hadoop: This Java-based programming framework supports processing and storage of extremely large sets of data. This is an open source framework and is part of the Apache project, sponsored by Apache Software Foundation, which works in a distributed computing environment. Hadoop supporting software packages and components can be deployed by organizations in their local data center.

Apache Spark: Apache Spark is a fast engine used for big data processing that is capable of streaming and supporting SQL, graph processing, and machine learning. Alternatively, Apache Storm is also available as an open-source data processing system.

Cloudera Distributions: This is considered one of the latest open-source technologies available to discover, store, process, model, and serve large amounts of data. Apache Hadoop is considered part of this platform.

Hadoop on CloudStack to Crunch Data Effectively

Hadoop, which is modeled after Google’s MapReduce and File System technologies, has gained wide-spread adoption in the industry. This framework is similar to CloudStack and is implemented in Java.

Using a Hadoop cluster to crunch is possible and can be done quite effectively by utilizing a cloud or several bare metal boxes. Although CloudStack does not specifically offer Hadoop integration, the cloud environment does guarantee Hadoop workload performs as intended. Hadoop allows you to build and tune compute templates around the program, eliminating the need for large amounts of computing power. Saved resources are left in your compute resource pool so you can apply them to other Hadoop processes as needed.

As the first ever cloud platform in the industry to join the Apache Software Foundation, CloudStack has quickly become the logical cloud choice for organizations across the nation that prefer open-source options for their cloud and big data infrastructure.

The great synergy between CloudStack and Apache Hadoop is stirring up quite the excitement for companies, especially Hortonworks, who recently expressed their excitement to work with the CloudStack project team. This big data software company plans to identify opportunities where components of Hadoop can be utilized to back Cloud APIs.

The combination of Hadoop and CloudStack is truly a brilliant match made in the clouds, waiting to be used and deployed to crunch big data more effectively.