Month in Review: December 2016

Another month of big data solutions on the Big Data Blog.

Take a look at our summaries below and learn, comment, and share. Thank you for reading!

Implementing Authorization and Auditing using Apache Ranger on Amazon EMR
Apache Ranger is a framework to enable, monitor, and manage comprehensive data security across the Hadoop platform. Features include centralized security administration, fine-grained authorization across many Hadoop components (Hadoop, Hive, HBase, Storm, Knox, Solr, Kafka, and YARN) and central auditing. In this post, walk through the steps to enable authorization and audit for Amazon EMR clusters using Apache Ranger.

Amazon Redshift Engineering’s Advanced Table Design Playbook
Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte scale, massively parallel data warehouse that offers simple operations and high performance. In practice, the best way to improve query performance by orders of magnitude is by tuning Amazon Redshift tables to better meet your workload requirements. This five-part blog series will guide you through applying distribution styles, sort keys, and compression encodings and configuring tables for data durability and recovery purposes.

• Part 1: Preamble, Prerequisites, and Prioritization
• Part 2: Distribution Styles and Distribution Keys
• Part 3: Compound and Interleaved Sort Keys
• Part 4: Compression Encodings
• Part 5: Table Data Durability

Interactive Analysis of Genomic Datasets Using Amazon Athena
In this post, learn to prepare genomic data for analysis with Amazon Athena. We’ll demonstrate how Athena is well-adapted to address common genomics query paradigms using the Thousand Genomes dataset hosted on Amazon S3, a seminal genomics study. Although this post is focused on genomic analysis, similar approaches can be applied to any discipline where large-scale, interactive analysis is required.

Joining and Enriching Streaming Data on Amazon Kinesis
In this blog post, learn three approaches for joining and enriching streaming data on Amazon Kinesis Streams by using Amazon Kinesis Analytics, AWS Lambda, and Amazon DynamoDB.

Using SaltStack to Run Commands in Parallel on Amazon EMR
SaltStack is an open source project for automation and configuration management. It started as a remote execution engine designed to scale to many machines while delivering high-speed execution. You can now use the new bootstrap action that installs SaltStack on Amazon EMR. It provides a basic configuration that enables selective targeting of the nodes based on instance roles, instance groups, and other parameters.

Building an Event-Based Analytics Pipeline for Amazon Game Studios’ Breakaway
Amazon Game Studios’ new title Breakaway is an online 4v4 team battle sport that delivers fast action, teamwork, and competition. In this post, learn the technical details of how the Breakaway team uses AWS to collect, process, and analyze gameplay telemetry to answer questions about arena design.

Respond to State Changes on Amazon EMR Clusters with Amazon CloudWatch Events
With new support for Amazon EMR in Amazon CloudWatch Events, you can be notified quickly and programmatically respond to state changes in your EMR clusters. Additionally, these events are also displayed in the Amazon EMR console. CloudWatch Events allows you to create filters and rules to match these events and route them to Amazon SNS topics, AWS Lambda functions, Amazon SQS queues, streams in Amazon Kinesis Streams, or built-in targets.

Run Jupyter Notebook and JupyterHub on Amazon EMR
Data scientists who run Jupyter and JupyterHub on Amazon EMR can use Python, R, Julia, and Scala to process, analyze, and visualize big data stored in Amazon S3. Jupyter notebooks can be saved to S3 automatically, so users can shut down and launch new EMR clusters, as needed. See how EMR makes it easy to spin up clusters with different sizes and CPU/memory configurations to suit different workloads and budgets.

Derive Insights from IoT in Minutes using AWS IoT, Amazon Kinesis Firehose, Amazon Athena, and Amazon QuickSight
In this post, see how you can build a business intelligence capability for streaming IoT device data using AWS serverless and managed services. You can be up and running in minutes―starting small, but able to easily grow to millions of devices and billions of messages.

Serving Real-Time Machine Learning Predictions on Amazon EMR
The typical progression for creating and using a trained model for recommendations falls into two general areas: training the model and hosting the model. Model training has become a well-known standard practice. In this post, we highlight one way to host those recommendations using Amazon EMR with JobServer

Powering Amazon Redshift Analytics with Apache Spark and Amazon Machine Learning
In this post, learn to generate a predictive model for flight delays that can be used to help pick the flight least likely to add to your travel stress. To accomplish this, you’ll use Apache Spark running on Amazon EMR for extracting, transforming, and loading (ETL) the data, Amazon Redshift for analysis, and Amazon Machine Learning for creating predictive models.

FROM THE ARCHIVE

Running sparklyr – RStudio’s R Interface to Spark on Amazon EMR
Sparklyr is an R interface to Spark that allows users to use Spark as the backend for dplyr, one of the most popular data manipulation packages. Sparklyr provides interfaces to Spark packages and also allows users to query data in Spark using SQL and develop extensions for the full Spark API. This short post shows you how to run RStudio and sparklyr on EMR.

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