Disruptive Possibilities: How Big Data Changes Everything

by Jeffrey Needham

Overview

Big data has more disruptive potential than any information technology developed in the past 40 years. As author Jeffrey Needham points out in this revealing book, big data can provide unprecedented visibility into the operational efficiency of enterprises and agencies.

Disruptive Possibilities provides an historically-informed overview through a wide range of topics, from the evolution of commodity supercomputing and the simplicity of big data technology, to the ways conventional clouds differ from Hadoop analytics clouds. This relentlessly innovative form of computing will soon become standard practice for organizations of any size attempting to derive insight from the tsunami of data engulfing them.

Replacing legacy silos—whether they’re infrastructure, organizational, or vendor silos—with a platform-centric perspective is just one of the big stories of big data. To reap maximum value from the myriad forms of data, organizations and vendors will have to adopt highly collaborative habits and methodologies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781449369002
Publisher:	O'Reilly Media, Incorporated
Publication date:	05/06/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	94
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Jeff Needham is the founder of Scale Abilities, Inc., a Silicon Valley consulting firm, and does ecosystem platform engineering at Hortonworks in Palo Alto, California. With 25 years experience in both hardware and software engineering, he is a frequent writer and speaker on topics of database performance and scalability, platform engineering and Hadoop cluster technology. Customers appreciate Jeff's creative strategies for evaluating and implementing their big data initiatives.

Table of Contents

1 The Wall of Water 1

And Then There Was One 1

Commercial Supercomputing Comes of Age 2

A Stitch in Time 2

The Yellow Elephant in the Room 4

Scaling Yahoovians 5

Supercomputers Are Platforms 6

Big Data! Big Bang! 7

Endless Possibilities 8

2 Big Data: The Ultimate Computing Platform 11

Introduction to Platforms 11

Come Fly with Me 12

Computing Platforms 12

The End of an Era 13

Back to the Future 14

Engineering Big Data Platforms 15

The Art and Craft of Platform Engineering 16

KISS Me Kate 17

Perpetual Prototyping 18

Optimize Everything at Internet Scale 19

The Response Time Continuum 20

Epic Fail Insurance 21

Mind the Gap 23

I'll Take Silos for $1000, Alex 24

3 Organizations: The Other Platform 25

From Myelin to Metal 25

Silos 26

Industrial Grain Elevators 28

Platforms 1, Silos 0 29

Panic! Now! 30

Fear and Loathing 30

Risky Business 32

Probability and Outcome 32

Quantitative Qualities 33

The Soft Platform 33

4 The Reservoir of Data 35

The Actual Internet 35

Best of Inbred 36

Drowning Not Waving 38

Spinning Rust 39

A Spectrum of Perishability 3 9

Enclosed Water Towers 41

The Big Data Water District 42

The HDFS Reservoir 43

Third Eye Blind 44

Spectrum of Analytic Visibility 45

The Cost of Flexibility 47

5 Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs: When Clouds Meet Big Data 49

The Big Tease 49

Scalability 101 50

Motherboards and Apple Pie 52

Being and Nothingness 53

Parity Is for Farmers 54

Google in Reverse 55

Isolated Thunderstorms 56

The Myth of Private Clouds 57

My Other Data Center Is an RV Park 59

Converge Conventionally 59

6 Haystacks and Headgames 61

The Demise of Counting 61

Lose the Haystack 63

Mind Another Gap 64

Believing Is Seeing 65

Spatial Intelligence 67

Associative Supercomputing 68

Back from the Future 69

Acknowledgments 70