Preface

We live in an era where data defines business and is also growing exponentially, specifically in the cloud. Organizations that can empower their business with easy-to-use, fast, and real-time data will have a competitive edge over their peers; it is estimated that such organizations will save over $430 billion by 2020 compared to their peers.

Amazon QuickSight is an innovative next-generation cloud-powered BI service that makes it easy for anyone to build visualizations, perform ad hoc analysis, and quickly get business insights from their data. QuickSight delivers fast and responsive insights on big data and can scale to hundreds of users at a fraction of the cost when compared to traditional BI tools.

This practical example-rich guide begins by introducing you to Amazon QuickSight and reviewing what makes it unique, and explains how to get started building your first analysis on QuickSight. Moving ahead, you will get to know the entire AWS big data ecosystem, right from ingesting the data into various storage services and then use QuickSight's features to gain insights. We will next review how to perform lightweight transformations of the data within QuickSight in order to easily enrich your data and insights. Next, we will check out the various visualizations supported by QuickSight including analyses, dashboards, and story features that enable collaboration with your peers. We will next look at the QuickSight mobile application that empowers you with dashboards on the go. We will next look at how to build an end-to-end architecture for big data analytics using AWS Data Lake solution, which packages the most commonly needed components to jump-start such projects. Towards the end, you will learn what features the product is lacking and what's on the roadmap.

Throughout the book, you will be guided with step-by-step instructions, screenshots, data flow, and architecture models that you can reuse for your initiatives.