Next in my series on HDInsight, today I’ll be talking about Storm. HDInsight Storm is a distributed stream processing computational framework. It uses spouts which define information sources and bolts which are manipulations in processing to allow batch distributed processing of streaming data.

Think of it’s apology in the shape of a direct acyclic graph. It’s a DHE where the edges are named streams and direct the data from node to node. When you put it all together, it creates the data transformation pipeline.

When you break it down, it’s topology is like that of map/reduce jobs; the difference being that map/reduce jobs run in individual batches and Storm is processed continuously in real time.

The Storm cluster has 2 different types of nodes. There’s a Master node which executes a Nimbus which assigns tasks to machines and monitors their performance. The Worker node runs Supervisor which assigns tasks to the other worker nodes and operates them as needed.

The Storm cluster can’t monitor its own state and health, so it deploys a Zookeeper node to connect to the Nimbus and Supervisor to keep an eye on things.

The 3 main components of Storm are:

1. The topology which is basically a network for the stream and spout.

2. The stream which is an unbounded pipeline of tuples.

3. The spout which is the source of the data which converts the data to the tuple of streams and then sends the bolts to be processed.

What makes this effective is that the data processing engine is guaranteed as far as every tuple will be fully processed and delivered, giving it a 99.9% uptime SLA from Microsoft. It does this by tracking the lineage of the tuple as it makes its way through the typology. It works like a query system as the messages can be replayed if there’s a failure in delivery.

Some use cases for Storm:

• • Writing the data after it gets processed into an Azure Data Lake Store.
  • As a source for Azure Event Hubs, as well as processing events from here. It can take a vehicle sensor, for instance, and can process it in Event Hubs, then send the data to Cosmos DB or an Azure Storage Blob.
  • Twitter is using Storm in a variety of ways. They use it for discovery on their data, running real time analytics and personalization in real time, so when you log into Twitter it knows your preferences based on past visits. It also works for real time Search and for their own internal revenue optimization.

As with other HDInsight components, it’s used among various typologies to solve and satisfy big data requirements and workloads. For example, if you were doing a customer churn analysis in real time based on a Twitter feed, this would be a technology you would use along side Hadoop.

In continuation of my series on HDInsight and the different clusters within it, today I’ll cover HBase. HBase is a NoSQL database that provides random access and strong consistency for structured, unstructured and semi-structured data.

It’s a schema-less (or organized by families of columns) database. Another way to describe it is it’s sort of modeled after Google’s Bigtable, where data is stored in the rows of a table and then grouped by a column family. As it’s schema-less, neither the columns themselves or the data types inside of the columns need to be defined before using the data.

Some other key things to be aware of with HBase:

• As with all the HDInsight components, this get implemented as a managed cluster and a Platform as a Service offering in which we can separate compute nodes from storage.
• It has a scale out architecture that helps provide automatic sharding or horizontal partitioning of tables, where essentially rows of a table are held separately rather than splitting those columns as we would in a typical table normalization.
• Strong consistency for read and write as it’s part of the architecture of HBase.
• Automatic failover built in, so you have multiple clusters that you can failover to multiple nodes.
• In-memory caching for reads and writes, which helps with performance, as well as moving your data in and out quicker.

Some of the most common workloads:

• • A search engine like I mentioned with Google’s Bigtable, which builds indexes that map terms to webpages that contain them.
  • A key value store. Facebook uses HBase for their messaging system because it’s ideal for storing and managing internet communications.
  • Also, a good repository for collecting sensor data, so where large amounts of data are being pulled into this NoSQL Table and it can be used to build dashboards for reporting.

I still have a few HDInsight technologies to cover in this series. Many of these are interrelated and work together to complete and update data architecture.

Today I’m continuing my series on HDInsight with the focus on Spark clusters. HDInsight Spark clusters provide the required baseline for in-memory cluster computing. This technology has gained momentum over the last few years as the required levels of memory have increased, as well as the hardware.

So, being able to load a large amount of data into memory has become much more possible. In-memory data allows us to load and cache the data, so it’s much more responsive when working within the data, with querying off it or visualizing for instance.

Some benefits and features of HDInsight Spark are:

• Spark provides access to Scala programming language. This allows us to work with distributed data sets like collections, and it doesn’t require us to structure everything as map and reduce operations, thus making our operations more responsive and efficient.
• Quick deployment. You can deploy a Spark cluster, as with other Azure PaaS offerings, through the Azure portal. You can also do it through scripting, PowerShell or Azure automation
• Native integration with Zeppelin and Jupiter notebooks for your processing and visualization.
• The REST API Service allows for remote orchestration and job processing.
• Azure Data Lake support, allowing us to separate compute from storage, which lends itself to scalability. When compute and storage are handled separately, you can tear down your compute clusters, or nodes, and add new ones if you want to scale up/down. Then you can reattach to that storage without losing any of the work that you’ve done.
• As a PaaS offering, it integrates easily with other Azure services, like Event Hubs or HDInsight Kafka (which I’ll cover later this week) for data streaming applications.
• Support of concurrent queries which allows us to take better advantage of the processing power of the nodes.
• Native Power BI integration for visualization purposes; connecting directly to a Spark cluster from Power BI.
• Pre-loaded with Anaconda, which provides about 200 libraries for things like Machine Learning, advanced analytics and visualizations.

Best uses for Spark:

• • As with other workloads for big data, the in-memory processing allows us to do interactive data analysis and create business solutions. It uses that in-memory processing engine to have more responsive reports and data visualization.
  • It has the machine learning capability with built in support for the Jupiter and Zeppelin notebooks.
  • Pre-loaded with Anaconda distributed with 200 canned libraries so you can jump in and start using it quickly.
  • It handles streaming and real-time data workloads. You can extend your Event Hub queue, so you can bring in your data and report on it in real time scenarios. This is great if you’re using IoT; much more responsive than waiting for that refresh of ETL.

Be sure to check out my next post on HDInsight HBase.

In upcoming posts, I’ll begin a series focusing on Big Data and the Azure HDInsight offerings. If you don’t know, HDInsight is a fully managed, full spectrum open source analytics service for enterprises that allows you to use open source frameworks such as Hadoop, Spark, Hive, among others. It was introduced to Azure in 2013 and they’ve added more recent options, such as domain join clusters capabilities.

Today’s focus is on HDInsight Hadoop. What we’re talking about here is being able to work with big data workloads. These large amounts of data can be structured, unstructured or semi-structured data, like table structures, documents or photos.

It can be historical data that you’re looking to analyze or stream data that’s coming in real time. The goal of this is for you to process the data and generate information from it. Some advantages are:

• It’s a cloud native Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering within the Azure workplace.
• Lower cost and scalability because of the capability of separation of compute and storage. You can store your data there but can tear down the clusters so you’re not paying anything when they’re not running. You can also keep your storage and reattach to it with additional nodes to get scalability.
• Security and compliance with government regulations.
• You can do monitoring of the system within Azure. If you hook on the Enterprise Security Package, you have a capability to do some monitoring within the system, as well as setting up user accounts that tie into your Active Directory.
• It’s globally available, including Azure government, China and Germany Azure spaces.

Some of the uses for Hadoop HDInsight are:

• Batch processing ETL
• Data Warehousing
• IoT
• Streaming of data and processing – A use case example here is Toyota. They used this for their Connected Car Architecture Program where they were able to monitor their cars and stream it into an HDInsight cluster.
• Being more commonly used for data science workloads, as you get these massive data sets that you want to do data processing and analytics on, or a combination of items like wanting to run some data science and machine learning on some streaming data to do predictive analytics on what might happen next.

Another benefit is HDInsight clusters support multiple programming languages, like Java, Python, Scala, Pig Latin, Hive QL and Spark SQL. Basically, all common programming languages in the open source community that allow you to take advantage of the great, high performing technology for these big data workloads.

Coming up, I’ll discuss some of the cluster types available, such as HDInsight Spark, HBase, Storm, Kafka, Interactive Query and R-Server.