The Big Data Lambda Architecture seeks to provide data engineers and architects with a scalable, fault-tolerant data processing architecture and framework using loosely coupled, distributed systems. At a high level, the Lambda Architecture is designed to handle both real-time and historically aggregated batched data in an integrated fashion. It separates the duties of real-time and batch processing so purpose-built engines, processes, and storage can be used for each, while serving and query layers present a unified view of all of the data.

Historically, the Lambda Architecture demanded the use of various complex systems to achieve the outcomes of uniting batch and real-time views. Data platform engineers and architects were required to implement services running on Amazon EC2 for data collection and ingestion, batch processing, stream processing, serving layers, and dashboards/reporting. As time has gone on, AWS customers have continued to ask for managed solutions that scale seamlessly and put less focus on infrastructure, allowing teams to focus on what really matters: the data and the resulting insights.

In this post, I show you how you can use AWS services like AWS Glue to build a Lambda Architecture completely without servers. I use a practical demonstration to examine the tight integration between serverless services on AWS and create a robust data processing Lambda Architecture system.

New:  AWS Glue

With the launch of AWS Glue, AWS provides a portfolio of services to architect a Big Data platform without managing any servers or clusters. AWS Glue is a fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that makes it easy for customers to prepare and load their data for analytics. You can create and run an ETL job with a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. You simply point AWS Glue to your data stored on AWS, and AWS Glue discovers your data and stores the associated metadata (for example, the table definition and schema) in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. After it’s cataloged, your data is immediately searchable, queryable, and available for ETL.

AWS Glue generates the code to execute your data transformations and data loading processes. Furthermore, AWS Glue provides a managed Spark execution environment to run ETL jobs against a data lake in Amazon S3. In short, you can now run a Lambda Architecture in AWS in a completely 100% serverless fashion!

“Serverless” applications allow you to build and run applications without thinking about servers. What this means is that you can now stream data in real-time, process huge volumes of data in S3, and run SQL queries and visualizations against that data without managing server provisioning, installation, patching, or capacity scaling. This frees up your users to spend more time interpreting the data and deriving business value for your organization.

Solution overview

The AWS services involved in this solution include:

• AWS Glue
• Amazon Kinesis Firehose
• Amazon Kinesis Analytics
• Amazon S3
• Amazon Athena
• Amazon QuickSight

The following diagram explains how the services work together:

None of the included services require the creation, configuration, or installation of servers, clusters, and databases.

In this example, you use these services to send and process simulated streaming data of sensor devices to Kinesis Firehose and store the raw data in S3. Using AWS Glue, you analyze the raw data from S3 in batch-oriented fashion to look at the thermostat efficiency over time against the historical data, and store results back in S3.

Using Amazon Kinesis Analytics, you analyze and filter the data to detect inefficient sensors in real time. In this example, you detect inefficiencies in thermostat devices by comparing their temperature settings against the temperature they are reading (where thermostats are typically set between 70-72º F).

Finally, you use Athena and Amazon QuickSight to query and visualize the data and build a dashboard that can be shared with other users of Amazon QuickSight in your organization.

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Today, I’m excited to share information about some new features in Amazon QuickSight. First, you can now search for datasets, analyses, and dashboards in Amazon QuickSight using the unified search box, making it faster and easier to find and access your data. Next, you can now create filter groups with multiple filter conditions that are evaluated together using the OR operation. Finally, you can now use the built-in Amazon S3 analytics connector to visualize your S3 storage access patterns across multiple S3 buckets and configurations within a single Amazon QuickSight dashboard to optimize for cost.

Search

You can now easily and quickly find and access your datasets, analyses, and dashboards using the unified search box in Amazon QuickSight. Type in what you’re looking for and you get a list of all matches in a unified view. From there, you can take actions such as creating an analysis from a dataset, modifying a dataset, or accessing an analysis or dashboard.

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Salesforce Sales Cloud is a powerful platform for managing customer data. One of the key functions that the platform provides is the ability to track customer opportunities. Opportunities in Salesforce are used to track revenue, sales pipelines, and other activities from the very first contact with a potential customer to a closed sale.

Amazon QuickSight is a rich data visualization tool that provides the ability to connect to Salesforce data and use it as a data source for creating analyses, stories, and dashboards  and easily share them with others in the organization. This post focuses on how to connect to Salesforce as a data source and create a useful opportunity dashboard, incorporating Amazon QuickSight features like relative date filters, Key Performance Indicator (KPI) charts, and more.

Walkthrough

In this post, you walk through the following tasks:

• Creating a new data set based on Salesforce data
• Creating your analysis and adding visuals
• Creating an Amazon QuickSight dashboard
• Working with filters

Note: For this walkthrough, I am using my own Salesforce.com Developer Edition account. You can sign up for your own free developer account at https://developer.salesforce.com/.

Creating a new Amazon QuickSight data set based on Salesforce data

To start, you need to create a new Amazon QuickSight data set. Sign in to Amazon QuickSight at https://quicksight.aws using the link from the home page. Enter your Amazon QuickSight account name and choose Continue. Next, enter your Email address or user name and password, then choose Sign In.

On the Amazon QuickSight start page, choose Manage Data, which takes you to a list of your data sets. Choose New Data Set, and choose Salesforce as your data source. Enter a data source name—in this example, I called mine “SFDC Opportunity.” Choose Create Data Source to open the Salesforce authentication page, where you can enter your Salesforce user name and password.

After you are authenticated to Salesforce, you are presented with a drop-down list that lets you select data from Reports or Objects. For this tutorial, choose Object. Scroll down in the list to choose the Opportunity object, and then choose Select.

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Have you ever been faced with many different data sources in different formats that need to be analyzed together to drive value and insights?  You need to be able to query, analyze, process, and visualize all your data as one canonical dataset, regardless of the data source or original format.

In this post, I walk through using AWS Glue to create a query optimized, canonical dataset on Amazon S3 from three different datasets and formats. Then, I use Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight to query against that data quickly and easily.

AWS Glue overview

AWS Glue is a fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that makes it easy for customers to prepare and load their data for query and analytics. You can create and run an ETL job with a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. Point AWS Glue to your data stored on AWS, and a crawler discovers your data, classifies it, and stores the associated metadata (such as table definitions) in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. After it’s cataloged, your data is immediately searchable, queryable, and available for ETL. AWS Glue generates the ETL code for data transformation, and loads the transformed data into a target data store for analytics.

The AWS Glue ETL engine generates Python code that is entirely customizable, reusable, and portable. You can edit the code using your favorite IDE or notebook and share it with others using GitHub. After your ETL job is ready, you can schedule it to run on the AWS Glue fully managed, scale-out Spark environment, using its flexible scheduler with dependency resolution, job monitoring, and alerting.

AWS Glue is serverless. It automatically provisions the environment needed to complete the job, and customers pay only for the compute resources consumed while running ETL jobs. With AWS Glue, data can be available for analytics in minutes.

Walkthrough

During this post, I step through an example using the New York City Taxi Records dataset. I focus on one month of data, but you could easily do this for the entire eight years of data. At the time of this post, AWS Glue is available in US-East-1 (N. Virginia).

As you crawl the unknown dataset, you discover that the data is in different formats, depending on the type of taxi. You then convert the data to a canonical form, start to analyze it, and build a set of visualizations… all without launching a single server.

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Today, I’m excited to share a couple of new features in Amazon QuickSight. First, with this release, we expanded connectivity options by adding Amazon Athena support in the EU (Ireland) Region. Additionally, you can now use Count Distinct on your dimensions and metrics in the visualizations and aggregate date fields by week for SPICE data sets.

Athena in Ireland

Athena is one of the most popular data sources used by QuickSight customers. It allows you to deploy a serverless BI and analytics architecture for your operational and business data. With this release, the Athena connector is now available in the EU (Ireland) Region. You can connect QuickSight to your Athena databases and tables in the region and start visualizing your data in a matter of seconds.

Count Distinct

You can now perform aggregations using Count Distinct in the visualizations, one of the top requests from users. To use Count Distinct, simply select Count Distinct as the aggregation on the visual axis or in the field well. Count Distinct is supported for both direct queries and SPICE data sets. You can apply it to strings and measures. It is available for all supported visualization types.

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When Amazon S3 analytics was released in November 2016, it gave you the ability to analyze storage access patterns and transition the right data to the right storage class. You could also manually export the data to an S3 bucket to analyze, using the business intelligence tool of your choice, and gather deeper insights on usage and growth patterns. This helped you reduce storage costs while optimizing performance based on usage patterns.

With today’s update, you can quickly and easily gain those deeper insights and benefits by analyzing and visualizing S3 analytics data in Amazon QuickSight. It takes just a single click from the S3 console, without the need for manual exports or additional data preparation.

If you already have S3 analytics storage class analysis enabled for your buckets, choose Explore in QuickSight on the top right.

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If you run an operation that continuously generates a large amount of data, you may want to know what kind of data is being inserted by your application. The ability to analyze data intake quickly can be very valuable for business units, such as operations and marketing. For many operations, it’s important to see what is driving the business at any particular moment. For retail companies, for example, understanding which products are currently popular can aid in planning for future growth. Similarly, for PR companies, understanding the impact of an advertising campaign can help them market their products more effectively.

This post covers an architecture that helps you analyze your streaming data. You’ll build a solution using Amazon DynamoDB Streams, AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis Firehose, and Amazon Athena to analyze data intake at a frequency that you choose. And because this is a serverless architecture, you can use all of the services here without the need to provision or manage servers.

The data source

You’ll collect a random sampling of tweets via Twitter’s API and store a variety of attributes in your DynamoDB table, such as: Twitter handle, tweet ID, hashtags, location, and Time-To-Live (TTL) value.

In DynamoDB, the primary key is used as an input to an internal hash function. The output from this function determines the partition in which the data will be stored. When using a combination of primary key and sort key as a DynamoDB schema, you need to make sure that no single partition key contains many more objects than the other partition keys because this can cause partition level throttling. For the demonstration in this blog, the Twitter handle will be the primary key and the tweet ID will be the sort key. This allows you to group and sort tweets from each user.

To help you get started, I have written a script that pulls a live Twitter stream that you can use to generate your data. All you need to do is provide your own Twitter Apps credentials, and it should generate the data immediately. Alternatively, I have also provided a script that you can use to generate random Tweets with little effort.

You can find both scripts in the Github repository:

https://github.com/awslabs/aws-blog-dynamodb-analysis

There are some modules that you may need to install to run these scripts. You can find them in Python’s module repository:

• boto3: https://aws.amazon.com/sdk-for-python/
• twitter: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/twitter
• names: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/names/
• loremipsum: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/loremipsum

To get your own Twitter credentials, go to https://www.twitter.com/ and sign up for a free account, if you don’t already have one. After your account is set up, go to https://apps.twitter.com/. On the main landing page, choose the Create New App button. After the application is created, go to Keys and Access Tokens to get your credentials to use the Twitter API. You’ll need to generate Customer Tokens/Secret and Access Token/Secret. All four keys will be used to authenticate your request.

Architecture overview

Before we begin, let’s take a look at the overall flow of information will look like, from data ingestion into DynamoDB to visualization of results in Amazon QuickSight.

As illustrated in the architecture diagram above, any changes made to the items in DynamoDB will be captured and processed using DynamoDB Streams. Next, a Lambda function will be invoked by a trigger that is configured to respond to events in DynamoDB Streams. The Lambda function processes the data prior to pushing to Amazon Kinesis Firehose, which will output to Amazon S3. Finally, you use Amazon Athena to analyze the streaming data landing in Amazon S3. The result can be explored and visualized in Amazon QuickSight for your company’s business analytics.

You’ll need to implement your custom Lambda function to help transform the raw <key, value> data stored in DynamoDB to a JSON format for Athena to digest, but I can help you with a sample code that you are free to modify.

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In April, we announced Amazon Redshift Spectrum in the AWS Blog. Redshift Spectrum is a new feature of Amazon Redshift that allows you to run complex SQL queries against exabytes of data in Amazon without having to load and transform any data.

We’re happy to announce that Amazon QuickSight now supports Redshift Spectrum. Starting today, QuickSight customers can leverage Redshift Spectrum to visualize and analyze vast amounts of unstructured data in their Amazon S3 data lake. With QuickSight and Redshift Spectrum, customers can now visualize combined data sets that include frequently accessed data stored in Amazon Redshift and bulk data sets stored cost effectively in S3 using the familiar SQL syntax of Amazon Redshift.

With Redshift Spectrum, you can start querying your data in Amazon S3 immediately, with no loading or transformation required. You just need to register your Amazon Athena data catalog or Hive Metastore as an external schema. You can then use QuickSight to select the external schema and the Redshift Spectrum tables—just like any other Amazon Redshift tables in your cluster―and start visualizing your S3 data in seconds. You don’t have to worry about scaling your cluster. Redshift Spectrum lets you separate storage and compute, allowing you to scale each independently. You only pay for the queries that you run.

Redshift Spectrum support is now available in these QuickSight regions – US East (N. Virginia and Ohio), and US West (Oregon).

To learn more about these capabilities and start using them in your dashboards, check out the QuickSight User Guide.

If you have questions and suggestions, post them on the QuickSight Discussion Forum.

Not a QuickSight user? Get started for FREE on the QuickSight page.

Since launch, Amazon QuickSight has enabled business users to quickly and easily analyze data from a wide variety of data sources with superfast visualization capabilities enabled by SPICE (Superfast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine). When setting up Amazon QuickSight access for business users, administrators have a choice of authentication mechanisms. These include Amazon QuickSight–specific credentials, AWS credentials, or in the case of Amazon QuickSight Enterprise Edition, existing Microsoft Active Directory credentials. Although each of these mechanisms provides a reliable, secure authentication process, they all require end users to input their credentials every time users log in to Amazon QuickSight. In addition, the invitation model for user onboarding currently in place today requires administrators to add users to Amazon QuickSight accounts either via email invitations or via AD-group membership, which can contribute to delays in user provisioning.

Today, we are happy to announce two new features that will make user authentication and provisioning simpler – Federated Single-Sign-On (SSO) and just-in-time (JIT) user creation.

Federated Single Sign-On

Federated SSO authentication to web applications (including the AWS Management Console) and Software-as-a-Service products has become increasingly popular, because Federated SSO lets organizations consolidate end-user authentication to external applications.

Traditionally, SSO involves the use of a centralized identity store (such as Active Directory or LDAP) to authenticate the user against applications within a corporate network. The growing popularity of SaaS and web applications created the need to authenticate users outside corporate networks. Federated SSO makes this scenario possible. It provides a mechanism for external applications to direct authentication requests to the centralized identity store and receive an authentication token back with the response and validity. SAML is the most common protocol used as a basis for Federated SSO capabilities today.

With Federated SSO in place, business users sign in to their Identity Provider portals with existing credentials and access QuickSight with a single click, without having to enter any QuickSight-specific passwords or account names. This makes it simple for users to access Amazon QuickSight for data analysis needs.

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Customers across the world are increasingly building innovative Internet of Things (IoT) workloads on AWS. With AWS, they can handle the constant stream of data coming from millions of new, internet-connected devices. This data can be a valuable source of information if it can be processed, analyzed, and visualized quickly in a scalable, cost-efficient manner. Engineers and developers can monitor performance and troubleshoot issues while sales and marketing can track usage patterns and statistics to base business decisions.

In this post, I demonstrate a sample solution to build a quick and easy monitoring and visualization dashboard for your IoT data using AWS serverless and managed services. There’s no need for purchasing any additional software or hardware. If you are already using AWS IoT, you can build this dashboard to tap into your existing device data. If you are new to AWS IoT, you can be up and running in minutes using sample data. Later, you can customize it to your needs, as your business grows to millions of devices and messages.

Architecture

The following is a high-level architecture diagram showing the serverless setup to configure.

AWS service overview

AWS IoT is a managed cloud platform that lets connected devices interact easily and securely with cloud applications and other devices. AWS IoT can process and route billions of messages to AWS endpoints and to other devices reliably and securely.

Amazon Kinesis Firehose is the easiest way to capture, transform, and load streaming data continuously into AWS from thousands of data sources, such as IoT devices. It is a fully managed service that automatically scales to match the throughput of your data and requires no ongoing administration.

Amazon Kinesis Analytics allows you to process streaming data coming from IoT devices in real time with standard SQL, without having to learn new programming languages or processing frameworks, providing actionable insights promptly.

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