AWS analytics tools help make sense of big data

Introduction

The rise of public cloud has legitimized the data analytics market -- making big data a bigger deal than ever before. Companies that have been collecting terabytes of data for years can now use public cloud as a cost-effective approach to mine and analyze that data. And successful big data analytics strategies often mean a competitive advantage for companies.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a variety of data analytics tools. AWS customers can do everything from process data in real time to implement machine learning for applications. Currently, there are five primary AWS products for cloud-based analytics: Elastic MapReduce (EMR), Kinesis, Redshift, Data Pipeline and Machine Learning.

Third-party tools also exist to diversify and expand on the AWS analytics portfolio. While each service supports big data in its own way, it's key for administrators to understand each offering to ensure proper data integration.

1Parsing the petabytes-

Big data cloud computing

Successful businesses extract value from the large amounts of data they receive every day -- this is called big data cloud computing. This big data can be structured or not and can be characterized by its volume, variety and processing velocity. Before learning about AWS offerings to help analyze the data, it's important to understand how to make sense of the massive amounts of unstructured data enterprises collect -- and how this differs from analyzing data in the public cloud.

Tip

AWS big data analytics -- What does Amazon offer?

Become familiar with Amazon's big data analytics products to help find a fit for your enterprise. Continue Reading

Feature

Use Amazon tools, staff appropriately for big data analytics

Amazon's tools are helpful, but enterprises must also seek out qualified candidates despite a skills gap. Continue Reading

News

Google's search engine database advances big data

The release of Google Cloud Bigtable, a managed and scalable NoSQL database, added competition for AWS. Continue Reading

Feature

Technological look into mining data

Take a thorough look at the different technologies related to big data analytics and how they can help business operations. Continue Reading

Feature

Analytics as a service offers infrastructure-free alternative

Big data presents challenges for businesses trying to make use of it. Some enterprises are looking to analytics firms to ease the analytics burden. Continue Reading

2Shepherd, protect big data-

Accessing, protecting and storing big data

Amazon Web Services makes managing big data easier and more cost effective than ever, with a variety of options to store the petabytes. Amazon's typical slate of products is well equipped for storing big data, including Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Block Store (EBS). But speed is a consideration in data analytics; the faster an enterprise can access its data, the faster it can act on it. Enterprises can access that data more quickly by using a secure NoSQL database, which relies on solid-state hard drives. DynamoDB is a great place to start, though third-party options are available. Amazon Relational Database Service plays a complimentary role to a NoSQL database by offering quick and consistent performance, and is optimized for transactional workloads. Elastic File System can be another useful tool in big data projects, scaling up to handle large flows of data.

3Put all the data to use-

Process big data, and then visualize it

Once you're ready to mine and process data from your databases, there is no shortage of tools to help with that task. In some situations, enterprises need instantaneous information -- such as monetary transactions, social media response and clickstreams. Amazon Kinesis allows users to build a dashboard or application to monitor information as soon as it comes in from the data stream. Kinesis dashboards are one method for visualizing big data, but it might not suit the needs of every business. Third-party options like Tableau offer connectivity to EMR and other AWS products. Being able to see past data and using it to generate predictive algorithms is another challenge. And creating mathematical algorithms to interpret future data can be a tough and time-consuming task. Amazon Machine Learning provides visualization tools and helps create models to react to real-time data.

4Must-know big data terminology-

Glossary

This glossary of common terms relating to big data analytics can help you get started.