Chapter 1. The Essence of Big Data in the Cloud

How to quantify data into business value? It's a serious question that we might be prompted to ask when we take a look around and notice the increasing appetite of users for rich media and the content of data across the web. That could generate several challenging points: How to manage the exponential amount of data? Particularly, how to extract from these immense waves of data the most valuable aspects? It is the era of big data! To meet the growing demand of big data and facilitate its analysis, few solutions such as Hadoop and Spark appeared and have become a necessary tool towards making a first successful step into the big data world. However, the first question was not sufficiently answered! It might be needed to introduce a new architecture and cost approach to respond to the scalability of intensive resources consumed when analyzing data. Although Hadoop, for example, is a great solution to run data analysis and processing, there are difficulties with configuration and maintenance. Besides, its complex architecture might require a lot of expertise. In this book, you will learn how to use OpenStack to manage and rapidly configure a Hadoop/Spark cluster. Sahara, the new OpenStack integrated project, offers an elegant self-service to deploy and manage big data clusters. It began as an Apache 2.0 project and now Sahara has joined the OpenStack ecosystem to provide a fast way of provisioning Hadoop clusters in the cloud. In this chapter, we will explore the following points: