Data Ingestion, Processing and Architecture

layers for Big Data and IoT

Reading Time: 32 Minutes

by Navdeep Singh Gill | March 03,

2017 

Overview of Big Data, Data

Ingestion and Processing
In the era of the Internet of Things and Mobility, with a huge volume of data
becoming available at a fast velocity, there must be the need for an efficient Analytics
System.

Also, the variety of data is coming from various sources in different formats, such as
sensors, logs, structured data from an RDBMS, etc. In the past few years, the
generation of new data has drastically increased. More applications are being built,
and they are generating more data at a faster rate. 

Earlier, Data Storage was costly, and there was an absence of technology which could
process the data in an efficient manner. Now the storage costs have become cheaper,
and the availability of technology to transform Big Data is a reality.
What is Big Data Technology?
According to the Author Dr. Kirk Borne, Principal Data Scientist, Big Data Definition
is Everything, Quantified, and Tracked. Let’s pick that apart - 

 Everything – Means every aspect of life, work, consumerism, entertainment,

and play is now recognized as a source of digital information about you, your
world, and anything else we may encounter.
 Quantified – Means we are storing those "everything” somewhere, mostly in
digital form, often as numbers, but not always in such formats. The
quantification of features, characteristics, patterns, and trends in all things is
enabling Data Mining, Machine Learning, statistics, and discovery at an
unprecedented scale on an unprecedented number of things. The Internet of
Things is just one example, but the Internet of Everything is even more
impressive.
 Tracked – Means we don’t directly quantify and measure everything just once,
but we do so continuously. It includes - tracking your sentiment, your web
clicks, your purchase logs, your geolocation, your social media history, etc. or
tracking every car on the road, or every motor in a manufacturing plant or
every moving part on an airplane, etc. Consequently, we see the emergence of
smart cities, smart highways, personalized medicine, personalized education,
precision farming, and so much more.

Advantages of Big Data 

 Smarter Decisions
 Better Products
 Deeper Insights
 Greater Knowledge
 Optimal Solutions
 Customer-Centric Products
 Increased Customer Loyalty
 More Automated Processes, more accurate Predictive and Prescriptive
Analytics
 Better models of future behaviors and outcomes in Business, Government,
Security, Science, Healthcare, Education, and more.

D2D Communication Meets Big Data

 Data-to-Decisions
  Data-to-Discovery
 Data-to-Dollars 

10 Vs of Big Data

Big Data Architecture & Patterns

The Best Way to a solution is to "Split The Problem."Big Data Solution can be well
understood using Layered Architecture. The Layered Architecture is divided into
different Layers where each layer performs a  particular function.

This Architecture helps in designing the Data Pipeline with the various requirements
of either Batch Processing System or Stream Processing System. This architecture
consists of 6 layers which ensure a secure flow of data.
  Data Ingestion Layer
This layer is the first step for the data coming from variable sources to start its
journey. Data here is prioritized and categorized which makes data flow smoothly in
further layers.

 Data Collector Layer

In this Layer, more focus is on the transportation of data from ingestion layer to rest
of data pipeline. It is the Layer, where components are decoupled so that analytic
capabilities may begin.

 Data Processing Layer

In this primary layer, the focus is to specialize the data pipeline processing system, or
we can say the data we have collected in the previous layer is to be processed in this
layer. Here we do some magic with the data to route them to a different destination,
classify the data flow and it’s the first point where the analytic may take place.

 Data Storage Layer

Storage becomes a challenge when the size of the data you are dealing with, becomes
large. Several possible solutions can rescue from such problems. Finding a storage
solution is very much important when the size of your data becomes large. This
layer focuses on "where to store such a large data efficiently."

 Data Query Layer

This is the layer where active analytic processing takes place. Here, the primary focus
is to gather the data value so that they are made to be more helpful for the next layer.

 Data Visualization Layer

The visualization, or presentation tier, probably the most prestigious tier, where the
data pipeline users may feel the VALUE of DATA. We need something that will grab
people’s attention, pull them into, make your findings well-understood.

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Data Ingestion Patterns

Big Data Ingestion Architecture

Data ingestion is the first step for building Data Pipeline and also the toughest task in
the System of Big Data. In this layer we plan the way to ingest data flows from
hundreds or thousands of sources into Data Center. As the Data is coming from
Multiple sources at variable speed, in different formats.

That's why we should properly ingest the data for the successful business decisions
making. It's rightly said that "If starting goes well, then, half of the work is already
done."

What is Ingestion in Big Data?

Big Data Ingestion involves connecting to various data sources, extracting the data, and
detecting the changed data. It's about moving data - and especially the unstructured data
- from where it is originated, into a system where it can be stored and analyzed.

We can also say that Data Ingestion means taking data coming from multiple sources
and putting it somewhere it can be accessed. It is the beginning of Data Pipeline
where it obtains or import data for immediate use.

Data can be streamed in real time or ingested in batches, When data is ingested in real
time then, as soon as data arrives it is ingested immediately. When data is ingested in
batches, data items are ingested in some chunks at a periodic interval of time.
Ingestion is the process of bringing data into Data Processing system.

Effective Data Ingestion process begins by prioritizing data sources, validating

individual files and routing data items to the correct destination.
Challenges in Data Ingestion
As the number of IoT devices increases, both the volume and variance of Data
Sources are expanding rapidly. So, extracting the data such that it can be used by the
destination system is a significant challenge regarding time and resources. Some of
the other problems faced by Data Ingestion are - 

 When numerous Big Data sources exist in the different format, it's the biggest
challenge for the business to ingest data at the reasonable speed and further
process it efficiently so that data can be prioritized and improves business
decisions.
 Modern Data Sources and consuming application evolve rapidly.
 Data produced changes without notice independent of consuming application.
 Data Semantic Change over time as same Data Powers new cases.
 Detection and capture of changed data - This task is difficult, not only because
of the semi-structured or unstructured nature of data but also due to the low
latency needed by individual business scenarios that require this determination.

That's why it should be well designed assuring following things -

 Able to handle and upgrade the new data sources, technology and applications
 Assure that consuming application is working with correct, consistent and
trustworthy data.
 Allows rapid consumption of data
 Capacity and reliability - The system needs to scale according to input coming
and also it should be fault tolerant.
 Data volume - Though storing all incoming data is preferable; there are some
cases in which aggregate data is stored.

Data Ingestion Parameters

 Data Velocity - Data Velocity deals with the speed at which data flows in from
different sources like machines, networks, human interaction, media sites,
social media. The movement of data can be massive or continuous.
 Data Size - Data size implies enormous volume of data. Data is generated from
different sources that may increase timely.
 Data Frequency (Batch, Real-Time) - Data can be processed in real time or batch,
in real time processing as data received on same time, it further proceeds but in
batch time data is stored in batches, fixed at some time interval and then further
moved.
  Data Format (Structured, Semi-Structured, Unstructured) - Data can be in
different formats, mostly it can be the structured format, i.e., tabular one or
unstructured format, i.e., images, audios, videos or semi-structured, i.e., JSON
files, CSS files, etc.

Big Data Ingestion Key Principles

To complete the process of Data Ingestion, we should use right tools for that and most
important that tools should be capable of supporting some of the fundamental
principles written below -

 Network Bandwidth - Data Pipeline must be able to compete with business

traffic. Sometimes traffic increases or sometimes decreases, so Network
bandwidth scalability is biggest Data Pipeline challenge. Tools are required for
bandwidth throttling and compression capabilities.
 Unreliable Network - Data Ingestion Pipeline takes data with multiple structures,
i.e., images, audios, videos, text files, tabular files data, XML files, log files,
etc. and due to the variable speed of data coming, it might travel through the
unreliable network. Data Pipeline should be capable of supporting this also.
 Heterogeneous Technologies and System - Tools for Data Ingestion Pipeline must
be able to use different data sources technologies and different operating
system.
 Choose Right Data Format - Tools must provide data serialization format, that
means as data comes in the variable format so converting them into single
format will provide an easier view to understand or relate the data.
 Streaming Data - It depends upon business necessity whether to process the data
in batch or streams or real time. Sometimes we may require both processing.
So, tools must be capable of supporting both.

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Data Serialization in Big Data

Different types of users have various types of data consumer needs. Here we want to
share variable data, so we must plan how the user can access data in a meaningful
way. That's why a single image of variable data optimize the data for human
readability.

Approaches used for this are -

  Apache Thrift

It's an RPC Framework containing Data Serialization Libraries.

 Google Protocol Buffers

It can use the specially generated source code to easily write and read structured data
to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages.

 Apache Avro

The more recent Data Serialization format that combines some of the best features
which previously listed. Avro Data is self-describing and uses a JSON-schema
description. This schema is included with the data itself and natively support
compression. Probably it may become a de facto standard for Data Serialization.

Big Data Ingestion Tools

Apache Flume Architecture

Apache Flume is a distributed, reliable, and available service for efficiently collecting,
aggregating, and moving large amounts of log data.

It has a straightforward and flexible architecture based on streaming data flows. It is

robust and faults tolerant with tunable reliability mechanisms and many failovers and
recovery mechanisms.

It uses a simple, extensible data model that allows for an online analytic application. 

Functions of Apache Flume

 Stream Data - Ingest streaming data from multiple sources into Hadoop for
storage and analysis.
 Insulate System - Buffer storage platform from transient spikes, when the rate of
incoming data exceeds the rate at which data can be written to the destination
 Scale Horizontally - To ingest new data streams and additional volume as
needed.

Apache Nifi Overview

Apache Nifi provides an easy to use, the powerful, and reliable system to process and
distribute data. Apache NiFi supports robust and scalable directed graphsof data routing,
transformation, and system mediation logic. Its functions are -

 Track data flow from beginning to end

 Seamless experience between design, control, feedback, and monitoring
 Secure because of SSL, SSH, HTTPS, encrypted content.

Integrating Elasticsearch with Logstash

Elastic Logstash is an open source, server-side data processing pipeline that ingests
data from a multitude of sources simultaneously transforms it, and then sends it to
your “stash, " i.e., Elasticsearch.

It easily ingests from your logs, metrics, web applications, data stores, and various
AWS services and done in continuous, streaming fashion. It can Ingest Data of all
Shapes, Sizes, and Sources.

Big Data Pipeline Architecture

In this Layer, more focus is on transportation data from ingestion layer to rest of Data
Pipeline. Here we use a messaging system that will act as a mediator between all the
programs that can send and receive messages.
Here the tool used is Apache Kafka. It's a new approach in message-oriented
middleware.

Getting Started with Big Data Pipeline

 Data Pipeline the main component of Data Integration. All transformation of
data happens in Data Pipeline.
 It is a Python-based tool that streams and transforms real-time data to service
that need it.
 Data Pipeline Automate the movement and transformation of data. Data
Pipeline is a Data Processing engine that runs inside your application.
 It is used to transform all the incoming data in a standard format so that we can
prepare it for analysis and visualization. Data Pipeline is built on Java Virtual
Machine (JVM).
 So, a Data Pipeline is a series of steps that your data moves through. The output
of one step in the process becomes the input of the next. Data, typically raw
data, goes on one side, passes through a series of steps.
 The steps of a Data Pipeline can include cleaning, transforming, merging,
modelling and more, in any combination.

Big Data Pipeline Functions

 Data Ingestion

Data Pipeline Helps in bringing data into your system. It means taking unstructured
data from where it is originated into a system where it can be stored and analyzed for
making business decisions

 Data Integration

Data Pipeline also helps in bringing different types of data together.

 Data Organization

Organizing data means an arrangement of data; this arrangement is also made in Data
Pipeline.

 Data Refining

It's also one of the processes where we can enhance, clean, improve the raw data.

 Data Analytics
After improving the useful data, Data Pipeline provides us with the processed data on
which we can apply the operations on raw data and can make business decisions
accurately.

Need Of Big Data Pipeline

A Data Pipeline is software that takes data from multiple sources and makes it
available to be used strategically for making business decisions.

Primarily reasons for the need of data pipeline is because it's tough to monitor Data
Migration and manage data errors. Other reasons for this are below -

 Business Decisions - Critical Analysis is only possible when combining data

from multiple sources. For making business decisions, we should have a single
image of all the data coming.
 Connections - All the time data keeps on increasing, new data came and old data
modified, so, each new integration can take anywhere from a few days to a few
months to complete.
 Accuracy - The only way to build trust with data consumers is to make sure that
your data is auditable. One best practice that’s easy to implement is never to
discard inputs or intermediate forms when altering data.
 Latency - The fresher your data, the agiler your company’s decision-making can
be. Extracting data from APIs and databases in real-time can be difficult, and
many target data sources, including large object stores like Amazon S3 and
analytics databases like Amazon Redshift, are optimized for receiving data in
chunks rather than a stream.
 Scalability - Data can be increased or decreased with time we can't say for on
Monday data will come less and rest of days comes a lot for processing. So,
usage of data is not uniform. What we can do is making our pipeline so scalable
that able to handle any amount of data coming at variable speed.

Big Data Pipeline Use Cases

Data Pipeline is useful to some roles, including CTOs, CIOs, Data Scientists, Data
Engineers, BI Analysts, SQL Analysts, and anyone else who derives value from a
unified real-time stream of user, web, and mobile engagement data. So, use cases for
data pipeline are given below -

 For Business Intelligence Teams

 For SQL Experts
 For Data Scientists
  For Data Engineers
 For Product Teams

 Apache Kafka Overview

It is used for building real-time data pipelines and streaming apps. It can process
streams of data in real-time and store streams of data safely in a distributed replicated
cluster.

Kafka works in combination with Apache Storm, Apache HBase and Apache Spark
for real-time analysis and rendering of streaming data.

 Building Real-Time streaming Data Pipelines that reliably get data between
systems or applications
 Building Real-Time streaming applications that transform or react to the
streams of data.

Apache Kafka Use Cases

 Stream Processing
 Website Activity Tracking
 Metrics Collection and Monitoring
 Log Aggregation

Apache Kafka Features

 One of the features of Apache Kafka is durable Messaging.
 Apache Kafka relies heavily on the file system for storing and caching
messages: rather than maintain as much as possible in memory and flush it all
out to the filesystem, all data is immediately written to a persistent log on the
filesystem without necessarily flushing to disk.
 Apache Kafka solves the situation where the producer is generating messages
faster than the consumer can consume them in a reliable way.

Apache Kafka Architecture

Apache Kafka System design act as Distributed commit log, where incoming data is
written sequentially on disk. There are four main components involved in moving data
in and out of Apache Kafka -
  Topics - Topic is a user-defined category to which messages are published.
 Producers - Producers post messages to one or more topics
 Consumers - Consumers subscribe to topics and process the posted messages.
 Brokers - Brokers that manage the persistence and replication of message data.

Big Data Processing Layer

In the previous layer, we gathered the data from different sources and made it
available to go through rest of pipeline.

In this layer, our task is to do magic with data, as now data is ready we only have
to route the data to different destinations.

In this main layer, the focus is to specialize Data Pipeline processing system or we can
say the data we have collected by the last layer in this next layer we have to do
processing on that data.

Big Data Batch Processing System

A simple batch processing system for offline analytics. For doing this tool used is
Apache Sqoop.

What is Apache Sqoop?

It efficiently transfers bulk data between Apache Hadoop and structured datastores
such as relational databases. Apache Sqoop can also be used to extract data from
Hadoop and export it into external structured data stores.

Apache Sqoop works with relational databases such as Teradata, Netezza, Oracle,
MySQL, Postgres, and HSQLDB.

Functions of Apache Sqoop

 Import sequential data sets from mainframe

 Data imports
 Parallel Data Transfer
 Fast data copies
 Efficient data analysis
 Load balancing

Near Real-Time Processing System

A pure online processing system for online analytics. For this type of
processing Apache Storm is used. The Apache Storm cluster makes decisions about the
criticality of the event and sends the alerts to the warning system (dashboard, e-mail,
other monitoring systems).

What is Apache Storm?

It is a system for processing streaming data in real time. It adds reliable real-time data
processing capabilities to Enterprise Hadoop. Storm on YARN is powerful for
scenarios requiring real-time analytics, machine learning and continuous monitoring
of operations.

6 Key Features of Apache Storm

 Fast – It can process one million 100 byte messages per second per node.
 Scalable – It can do parallel calculations that run across a cluster of machines.
 Fault-tolerant – When workers die, Storm will automatically restart them. If a
node dies, the worker will be restarted on another node.
 Reliable – Storm guarantees that each unit of data (tuple) will be processed at
least once or exactly once. Messages are only replayed when there are failures.
 Easy to operate – It consists of Standard configurations that are suitable for
production on day one. Once deployed, Storm is easy to work.
  Hybrid Processing system - This consist of Batch and Real-time processing
System capabilities. For this type of processing tool used is Apache Spark and
Apache Flink.

What is Apache Spark?

Apache Spark is a fast, in-memory data processing engine with elegant and expressive
development APIs to allow data workers to efficiently execute streaming, machine
learning or SQL workloads that require fast iterative access to data sets.

With Spark running on Apache Hadoop YARN, developers everywhere can now
create applications to exploit Spark’s power, derive insights, and enrich their data
science workloads within a single, shared data set in Hadoop.

Real-Time Processing System

What is Apache Flink?

Apache Flink is an open-source framework for distributed stream processing that

Provides results that are accurate, even in the case of out-of-order or late-arriving
data. Some of its features are -

 It is stateful and fault-tolerant and can seamlessly recover from failures while
maintaining exactly-once application state.
 Performs at large scale, running on thousands of nodes with excellent
throughput and latency characteristics.
 It's streaming data flow execution engine, APIs and domain-specific libraries
for Batch, Streaming, Machine Learning, and Graph Processing.

Apache Flink Use Cases

 Optimization of e-commerce search results in real-time

 Stream processing-as-a-service for data science teams
 Network/Sensor monitoring and error detection
 ETL for Business Intelligence Infrastructure

Big Data Storage Layer

Next, the major issue is to keep data in the right place based on usage. We have
relational Databases that were a successful place to store our data over the years.

But with the new big data strategic enterprise applications, you should no longer be
assuming that your persistence should be relational.

We need different databases to handle the different variety of data, but using different
databases creates overhead. That's why there is an introduction to the new concept in
the database world, i.e., the Polyglot Persistence.

What is Polyglot Persistence?

Polyglot persistence is the idea of using multiple databases to power a single
application. Polyglot persistence is the way to share or divide your data into multiple
databases and leverage their power together.

It takes advantage of the strength of different database. Here various types of data are
arranged in a variety of ways. In short, it means picking the right tool for the right use
case.

It’s the same idea behind Polyglot Programming, which is the idea that applications
should be written in a mix of languages to take advantage of the fact that different
languages are suitable for tackling different problems.

Advantages of Polyglot Persistence -
  Faster response times - Here we leverage all the features of databases in one app,
which makes the response times of your app very quickly.
 Helps your app to scale well - Your app scales exceptionally well with the data.
All the NoSQL databases scale well when you model databases correctly for
the data that you want to store.
 A rich experience - You have a vibrant experience when you harness the power
of multiple databases at the same time. For example, if you want to search for
Products in an e-commerce app, then you use ElasticSearch, which returns the
results based on relevance, which MongoDB cannot do.

Big Data Storage Tools

HDFS : Hadoop Distributed File System

 HDFS is a Java-based file system that provides scalable and reliable data
storage, and it was designed to span large clusters of commodity servers.
 HDFS holds a huge amount of data and provides easier access.
 To store such massive data, the files are stored on multiple machines. These
files are stored redundantly to rescue the system from possible data losses in
case of failure.
 HDFS also makes applications available for parallel processing. HDFS is built
to support applications with large data sets, including individual files that reach
into the terabytes.
 It uses a master/slave architecture, with each cluster consisting of a single
NameNode that manages file system operations and supporting DataNodes that
manage data storage on individual compute nodes.
 When HDFS takes in data, it breaks the information down into separate pieces
and distributes them to different nodes in a cluster, allowing for parallel
processing.
 The file system also copies each piece of data multiple times and distributes the
copies to individual nodes, placing at least one copy on a different server rack
 HDFS and YARN from the data management layer of Apache Hadoop.

Features of HDFS

 It is suitable for the distributed storage and processing.

 Hadoop provides a command interface to interact with HDFS.
 The built-in servers of name node and data node help users to quickly check the
status of the cluster.
 Streaming access to file system data.
  HDFS provides file permissions and authentication.

GlusterFS: Dependable Distributed File System

As we know good storage solution must provide elasticity in both storage and
performance without affecting active operations.

Scale-out storage systems based on GlusterFS are suitable for unstructured data such
as documents, images, audio and video files, and log files. GlusterFS is a scalable
network filesystem.

Using this, we can create large, distributed storage solutions for media streaming, data
analysis, and other data- and bandwidth-intensive tasks.

 It's Open Source.

 You can deploy GlusterFS with the help of commodity hardware servers.
 Linear scaling of performance and storage capacity.
 Scale storage size up to several petabytes, which can be accessed by thousands
for servers.

GlusterFS Use Cases

 Cloud Computing
 Streaming Media
 Content Delivery

Amazon S3 Storage Service

 Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is object storage with a simple
web service interface to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere
on the internet.
 It is designed to deliver 99.999999999% durability, and scale past trillions of
objects worldwide.
 Customers use S3 as primary storage for cloud-native applications; as a bulk
repository, or "data lake," for analytics; as a target for backup & recovery and
disaster recovery; and with serverless computing.
 It's simple to move large volumes of data into or out of S3 with Amazon's cloud
data migration options.
  Once data is stored on Amazon S3, it can be automatically tiered into lower
cost, longer-term cloud storage classes like S3 Standard - Infrequent Access
and Amazon Glacier for archiving.

Big Data Query Layer

It is the layer where active analytic processing takes place. This is a field where
interactive queries are necessaries, and it’s a zone traditionally dominated by SQL
expert developers. Before Hadoop, we had an insufficient storage due to which it
takes long analytics process.

At first, it goes through a Lengthy process, i.e., ETL to get a new data source ready to
be stored and after that, it puts the data in database or data warehouse. But now, data
analytics became essential step which solved problems while computing such a large
amount of data.

Companies from all industries use big data analytics to -

 Increase revenue
 Decrease costs
 Increase productivity

Big Data Analytics Query Tools

 Apache Hive Architecture
Apache Hive is data warehouse infrastructure built on top of Apache Hadoop for
providing data summarization, ad-hoc query, and analysis of large datasets.

Data analysts use Hive to query, summarize, explore and analyze that data, then turn it
into actionable business insight.

It provides a mechanism to project structure onto the data in Hadoop and to query that
data using a SQL - like a language called HiveQL (HQL).

Features of Apache Hive

 Query data with a SQL - based language.

 Interactive response times, even over massive datasets.
 It's scalable as data variety and volume grows, more commodity machines can
be added, without a corresponding reduction in performance Works with
traditional data integration and data analytics tools.

 Apache Spark SQL

Spark SQL includes a cost-based optimizer, columnar storage, and code generation to
make queries fast.

At the same time, it scales to thousands of nodes and multi-hour queries using the
Spark engine, which provides full mid-query fault tolerance.

Spark SQL is a Spark module for structured data processing. Some of the Functions
performed by Spark SQL are -

 The interfaces provided by Spark SQL provide Spark with more information
about the structure of both the data and the computation being performed.
 Internally, Spark SQL uses this extra information to perform additional
optimizations.
 One use of Spark SQL is to execute SQL queries.
 Spark SQL can also be used to read data from an existing Hive installation.

 Amazon Redshift

Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the

cloud. We use Amazon Redshift to load the data and run queries on the data.

We can also create additional databases as needed by running a SQL command. Most
important we can scale it from hundred gigabytes of data to a petabyte or more.
It enables you to use your data to acquire new insights for your business and
customers. The Amazon Redshift service manages all of the work of setting up,
operating and scaling a data warehouse.

These tasks include provisioning capacity, monitoring and backing of the cluster, and
applying patches and upgrades to the Amazon Redshift engine.

 Presto - SQL Query Engine For Big Data

Presto is an open source distributed SQL query engine for running interactive analytic
queries against data sources of all sizes ranging from gigabytes to petabytes.

Presto was designed and written for interactive analytics and approaches and the
speed of commercial data warehouses while scaling to the size of organizations like
Facebook.

Presto Capabilities

 Presto allows querying data where it lives, including Hive, Cassandra,

relational databases or even proprietary data stores.
 A single Presto query can combine data from multiple sources, allowing for
analytics across your entire organization.
 Presto is targeted at analysts who expect response times ranging from sub-
second to minutes.
 Presto breaks the false choice between having fast analytics using an expensive
commercial solution or using a slow "free" solution that requires excessive
hardware.

Who Uses Presto?

 Facebook uses Presto for interactive queries against several internal data stores,
including their 300PB Data Warehouse. Over 1,000 Facebook employees use
Presto daily to run more than 30,000 queries that in the complete scan over a
petabyte each per day.
 Leading internet companies including Airbnb and Dropbox are using Presto.

Data Lake and Data Warehouse

What is Data Warehouse?
A Data Warehouse is a subject-oriented, Integrated, Time-varying, non-volatile
collection of data in support of management’s decision-making process.

So, a Data Warehouse is a centralized repository that stores data from multiple
information sources and transforms them into a standard, multidimensional data
model for efficient querying and analysis.

Difference Between Big Data and Data Warehouse

While comparing, we found that a big data solution is a technology and that data
warehousing is an architecture. They are two very different things.

Technology is just that – a means to store and manage large amounts of data. A data
warehouse is a way of organizing data so that there are corporate credibility and
integrity.

When someone takes data from a data warehouse, that person knows that other people
are using the same data for other purposes. There is a basis for reconcilability of data
when there is a data warehouse.

What is Data Lake?

It is a new type of cloud-based enterprise architecture that structures data in a more
scalable way that makes it easier to experiment with it.

With data lake, incoming data goes into the lake in a raw form or whatever form data
source providers, and there we select and organize the data in a raw form. There are
no assumptions about the schema of the data; each data source can use whatever
scheme it likes.

It's up to the consumers of that information to make sense of that data for their
purposes. The idea is to have a single store for all of the raw data that anyone in an
organization might need to analyze.

Commonly people use Hadoop to work on the data in the lake, but the concept is
broader than just Hadoop.

Capabilities of Data Lake

 To capture and store raw data at scale for a low cost

 To store many types of data in the same repository
 To perform transformations on the data
  To define the structure of the data at the time, it is used, referred to as schema

Data Lake vs Data Warehouse

 With Data Lake incoming data goes into the lake in the raw form and then, we
select and organize the data in a raw form. In Data Warehouse Data is cleaned
and organized into single consistent schema before putting them into a
warehouse and then the analysis is done on the warehouse data.
 Data lakes retain all data. Not only the data that is in use but also data that it
might use in the future. On the other hand, when a data warehouse is being
developed, considerable time is spent in analyzing different data sources, along
with understanding business processes and profiling of data. Data is kept in its
raw form and is only transformed when it is ready to be used.
 In Data Lake all data in a data lake is stored in its natural form. Also, the data is
always accessible to someone in need of it. In Data Warehouses difficulty faced
when trying to induce a change in them. A lot of time is spent during
development to get the structure of the warehouse right. Although a good
warehouse design is capable of adapting to change.

Real-Time Data Monitoring, Data Visualization,Big

Data Security
This layer focus on Big Data Visualization. We need something that will grab
people’s attention, pull them in, make your findings well-understood. That’s why it
provides full Business Infographics. Because your findings from your data need the
annotation and the bold canvas.
Data Visualization Layer 
The data visualization layer often is the thermometer that measures the success of the
project. This is the where the data value is perceived by the user. While it’s designed
for handling and storing large volumes of data, Hadoop and other tools have no built-
in provisions for data visualization and information distribution, leaving no way to
make that data easily consumable by end business users.

Tools For Building Data Visualization Dashboards

Custom Dashboards for Data Visualization

Custom dashboards are useful for creating unique overviews that present data
differently, For example, you can -

 Show the web and mobile application information, server information, custom
metric data, and plugin metric data all on a single custom dashboard.
 Create dashboards that present charts and tables with a uniform size and
arrangement on a grid.
  Select existing New Relic charts for your dashboard, or create your charts and
tables.

Real-Time Visualization Dashboards

Real-Time Dashboards save, share, and communicate insights. It helps users generate
questions by revealing the depth, range, and content of their data stores.

 Data Visualization dashboards always change as new data arrives.

 In Zoomdata, you have the flexibility to create a data analytics dashboard with
just a single chart and then add to it as needed.
 Dashboards can contain multiple visualizations from multiple connections side
by side.
 You can quickly build, edit, filter, and delete dashboards and move and resize
them and then share them or integrate them into your web application.
 You can export a dashboard as an image or as a file configuration like JSON.
 You can also make multiple copies of your dashboard.

Data Visualization with Tableau

 Tableau is the richest data visualization tool available in the market. With Drag
and Drop functionality.
 Tableau allows users to design Charts, Maps, Tabular, Matrix reports, Stories
and Dashboards without any technical knowledge.
 Tableau helps anyone quickly analyze, visualize and share information.
Whether it’s structured or unstructured, petabytes or terabytes, millions or
billions of rows, you can turn big data into big ideas.
 It connects directly to local and cloud data sources, or import data for fast in-
memory performance.
 Make sense of big data with easy-to-understand visuals and interactive web
dashboards.

Exploring data sets With Kibana

 A Kibana dashboard displays a collection of saved visualizations. You can

arrange and resize the visualizations as needed and save dashboards, so they are
reloaded and shared.
 Kibana act as analytics and visualization platform that builds on Elasticsearch
to give you a better understanding of your data.
 Application Performance Monitoring is one key area to implement in projects
to ensure proper and smooth operations from day 1. APM solutions provide
 development and operations team with near real-time insights on how the
applications and services are performing in production, allowing for a proactive
tune of services, as well as for early detection of possible production issues.
 It gives you the freedom to select the way you give shape to your data. And you
don’t always have to know what you're looking for.
 Kibana core ships with the classics: histograms, line graphs, pie charts,
sunbursts, and more. They leverage the full aggregation capabilities of
Elasticsearch.
 The Kibana interface is divided into four main sections:
o Discover
o Visualize
o Dashboard
o Settings

Introduction to Intelligence Agents 

 An intelligent agent is a software that assists people and acts on their behalf.
Intelligent agents work by allowing people to delegate work that they could
have done, to the agent software.
 Agents can perform repetitive tasks, remember things you forgot, intelligently
summarize complex data, learn from you and even make recommendations to
you.
 An intelligent agent can help you find and filter information when you are
looking at corporate data or surfing the Internet and don't know where the right
information is.
 It could also customize information to your preferences, thus saving you the
time of handling it as more and more new information arrived each day on the
Internet.
 An agent could also sense changes in its environment and responds to these
changes.
 An agent continues to work even when the user is gone, which means that an
agent could run on a server, but in some cases, an agent runs on the user
systems.

Recommendation Systems

 Recommender systems provide personalized information by learning the user’s

interests from traces of interaction with that user. For a recommender system to
make predictions about a user’s interests, it has to determine a user model.
 A user model contains data about the user and should be represented in such a
way that the data can be matched to the items in the collection.
  The question is, what kind of data can be used to construct a user profile.
 Obviously, the items that users have seen in the past are important, but other
information such as the content of the items, the perception of users of the
items or information about users themselves could also be used.
 Most recommender systems focus on the task of information filtering, which
deals with the delivery of elements selected from an extensive collection that
the user is likely to find interesting or useful.
 Recommender systems are unique types of information filtering systems that
suggest items to users. Some of the largest e-commerce sites are using
recommender systems and apply a marketing strategy that is referred to asmass
customization.
 A content-based filtering system often uses many of the same techniques as an
information retrieval system (such as a search engine), because both systems
require a content description of the items in their domain. A recommender
system also requires the modelling of the user’s preferences for a longer period
which is not needed in an information retrieval system.
 There are several techniques that can be used to improve recommender systems
in different ways.

Angular.JS Framework

 AngularJS is a very powerful JavaScript Framework. It is used in Single Page

Application (SPA) projects.
 It extends HTML DOM with additional attributes and makes it more responsive
to user actions.
 AngularJS is open source, completely free, and used by thousands of
developers around the world.React is a library for building composable user
interfaces.
 It encourages the creation of reusable UI components which present data that
changes over time.

Understanding React.JS

 React is JavaScript Library used for building User Interface, focus on the UI,
not a framework.
 One way reactive data flow(no two-way Data Binding), Virtual DOM. React is
front-end library developed by Facebook.
 It's used for handling view layer for the web and mobile apps. ReactJS allows
us to create reusable UI components.
 It is currently one of the most popular JavaScript libraries, and it has a strong
foundation and large community behind it.
Useful Features of React

 JSX − JSX is JavaScript syntax extension. It isn't necessary to use JSX in React
development, but it is recommended.
 Components − React is all about components. You need to think of everything
as a component. This will help you to maintain the code when working on
larger scale projects.
 Unidirectional data flow and Flux − React implements one-way data flow
which makes it easy to reason about your app. Flux is a pattern that helps to
keep your data unidirectional.

Big Data Security and Data Flow

Security is the primary task of any work. Security should be implemented at all layers
of the lake starting from Ingestion, through Storage, Analytics, Discovery, all the way
to Consumption. For proving security to data pipeline, few steps are there that are:-

 Big Data Authentication

Authentication will verify user’s identity and ensure they are who they say they are.
Using the Kerberos protocol provides a reliable mechanism for authentication.

 Access Control
It is the next step to secure data, by defining which dataset can be consulted by the
users or services. Access control will restrict users and services to access only that
data which they have permission for; they will access all the data.

 Encryption and Data Masking

Encryption and data masking are required to ensure secure access to sensitive data.
Sensitive data in the cluster should be secured at rest as well as in motion. We need to
use proper Data Protection techniques which will protect data in the cluster from
unauthorized visibility.

 Auditing data access by users

Another aspect of data security requirement is Auditing data access by users. It can
detect the log on & access attempts as well as the administrative changes.

Real-Time Data Monitoring

Data In enterprise systems is like food – it has to be kept fresh. Also, it needs
nourishment. Otherwise, it goes wrong and doesn’t help you in making strategic and
operational decisions. Just as consuming spoiled food could make you sick, using
“spoiled” data may be bad for your organization’s health.
There may be plenty of data, but it has to be reliable and consumable to be valuable.
While most of the focus in enterprises is often about how to store and analyze large
amounts of data, it is also essential to keep this data fresh and flavorful.

So we can do this? The solution is for monitoring, auditing, testing, managing, and
controlling the data. Continuous monitoring of data is an important part of the
governance mechanisms. 

Apache Flume is useful for processing log data. Apache Storm is desirable for
operations monitoring Apache Spark for streaming data, graph processing, and
machine learning. Monitoring can happen in data storage layer. It includes following
steps for data monitoring:-

 Data Profiling and lineage

These are the techniques to identify the quality of data and the lifecycle of the data
through various phases. In these systems, it is important to capture the metadata at
every layer of the stack so it can be used for verification and profiling.Talend, Hive,
Pig.

 Data Quality

Data is considered to be of high quality if it meets business needs and it satisfies the
intended use so that it's helpful in making business decisions successfully. So,
understanding the dimension of greatest interest and implementing methods to achieve
it is important.

 Data Cleansing

It means implementing various solutions to correct the incorrect or corrupt data.

 Data Loss and Prevention

Policies have to be in place to make sure the loopholes for data loss are taken care of.
Identification of such data loss needs careful monitoring and quality assessment
processes.

How Can XenonStack Help You?

XenonStack Big Data Solutions can help you at every layer of Big Data Architecture.
XenonStack Big Data Services enables enterprises to Build, Manage and deploy Big
Data On-Premises, in the Cloud or on Hybrid Cloud Solutions Using Amazon Big
Data Solutions, Azure Big Data Solutions and Google Big Data Solutions.
XenonStack Big-Data-as-a-Service delivers -

Big Data Infrastructure Solutions

Deploy, Manage, Monitor Big Data Infrastructure on Apache Hadoop and Apache
Spark with different storage solutions HDFS, GlusterFS, and Tachyon On-Premises,
Hybrid and Public Cloud.

Apache Hadoop & Spark Consulting Services

XenonStack Delivers expert Apache Hadoop and Spark Consulting and Hadoop
Support Services. XenonStack offers innovative solutions for Apache Hadoop and
Spark and all of its components including - Kafka, Hive, Pig, MapReduce, Spark,
HDFS, HBase and more.

Big Data Security Solutions

Big Data Security solution provides authentication, authorization and Audit to Enable
Central Security Administration of Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, HDFS, Hive,
Hbase with Apache Knox and Apache Ranger. Secure Mode Cluster deployment of
Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark using Kerboses.