Tag: Apache Hadoop

Spark is the Future of Analytics

At the 2016 Spark Summit, Gartner Research Director Nick Heudecker asked: Is Spark the Future of Data Analysis?  It’s an interesting question, and it requires a little parsing. Nobody believes that Spark alone is the future of data analysis, even its most ardent proponents. A better way to frame the question: Does Spark have a role in the future of analytics? What is that role?

Unfortunately, Heudecker didn’t address the question but spent the hour throwing shade at Spark.

Spark is overhyped! He declared. His evidence? This:

screen-shot-2017-02-09-at-2-58-05-pm

One might question an analysis that equates real things like optimization with fake things like “Citizen Data Science.” Gartner’s Hype Cycle by itself proves nothing; it’s a conceptual salad, with neither empirical foundation nor predictive power.

If you want to argue that Spark is overhyped, produce some false or misleading claims by project principals, or documented cases where the software failed to work as claimed. It’s possible that such cases exist. Personally, I don’t know of any, and neither does Nick Heudecker, or he would have included them in his presentation.

Instead, he cited a Gartner survey showing that organizations don’t use Spark and Flink as much as they use other tools for data analysis. From my notes, here are the percentages:

  • EDW: 57%
  • Cloud: 44%
  • Hadoop: 42%
  • Stat Packages: 32%
  • Spark or Flink: 9%
  • Graph Databases: 8%

That 42% figure for Hadoop is interesting. In 2015, Gartner concern-trolled the tech community, trumpeting the finding that “only” 26% of respondents in a survey said they were “deploying, piloting or experimenting with Hadoop.” So — either Hadoop adoption grew from 26% to 42% in a year, or Gartner doesn’t know how to do surveys.

In any event, it’s irrelevant; statistical packages have been available for 40 years, EDWs for 25, Spark for 3. The current rate of adoption for a project in its youth tells you very little about its future. It’s like arguing that a toddler is cognitively challenged because she can’t do integral calculus without checking the Wolfram app on her iPad.

Heudecker closed his presentation with the pronouncement that he had no idea whether or not Spark is the future of data analysis, and bolted the venue faster than a jackrabbit on Ecstasy. Which begs the question: why pay big bucks for analysts who have no opinion about one of the most active projects in the Big Data ecosystem?

Here are eight reasons why Spark has a central role in the future of analytics.

(1) Nearly everyone who uses Hadoop will use Spark.

If you believe that 42% of enterprises use Hadoop, you must believe that 41.9% will use Spark. Every Hadoop distribution includes Spark. Hive and Pig run on Spark. Hadoop early adopters will gradually replace existing MapReduce applications and build most new applications in Spark. Late adopters may never use MapReduce.

The only holdouts for MapReduce will be those who want their analysis the way they want their barbecue: low and slow.

Of course, Hadoop adoption isn’t static. Forrester’s Mike Gualtieri argues that 100% of enterprises will use Hadoop within a few years.

(2) Lots of people who don’t use Hadoop will use Spark.

For Hadoop users, Spark is a fast replacement for MapReduce. But that’s not all it is. Spark is also a general-purpose data processing environment for advanced analytics. Hadoop has baggage that data science teams don’t need, so it’s no surprise to see that most Spark users aren’t using it with Hadoop. One of the key advantages of Spark is that users aren’t tied to a particular storage back end, but can choose from many different options. That’s essential in real-world data science.

(3) For scalable open source data science, Spark is the only game in town.

If you want to argue that Spark has no future, you’re going to have to name an alternative. I’ll give you a minute to think of something.

Time’s up.

You could try to approximate Spark’s capabilities with a collection of other projects: for example, you could use Presto for SQL, H2O for machine learning, Storm for streaming, and Giraph for graph analysis. Good luck pulling those together. H2O.ai was one of the first vendors to build an interface to Spark because even if you want to use H2O for machine learning, you’re still going to use Spark for data wrangling.

“What about Flink?” you ask. Well, what about it? Flink may have a future, too, if anyone ever supports it other than ten guys in a loft on the Tempelhofer Ufer. Flink’s event-based runtime seems well-suited for “pure” streaming applications, but that’s low-value bottom-of-the-stack stuff. Flink’s ML library is still pretty limited, and improving it doesn’t appear to be a high priority for the Flink team.

(4) Data scientists who work exclusively with “small data” still need Spark.

Data scientists satisfy most business requests for insight with small datasets that can fit into memory on a single machine. Even if you measure your largest dataset in gigabytes, however, there are two ways you need Spark: to create your analysis dataset and to parallelize operations.

Your analysis dataset may be small, but it comes from a larger pool of enterprise data. Unless you have servants to pull data for you, at some point you’re going to have to get your hands dirty and deal with data at enterprise scale. If you are lucky, your organization has nice clean data in a well-organized data warehouse that has everything anyone will ever need in a single source of truth.

Ha ha! Just kidding. Single sources of truth don’t exist, except in the wildest fantasies of data warehouse vendors. In reality, you’re going to muck around with many different sources and integrate your analysis data on the fly. Spark excels at that.

For best results, machine learning projects require hundreds of experiments to identify the best algorithm and optimal parameters. If you run those tests serially, it will take forever; distribute them across a Spark cluster, and you can radically reduce the time needed to find that optimal model.

(5) The Spark team isn’t resting on its laurels.

Over time, Spark has evolved from a research project for scalable machine learning to a general purpose data processing framework. Driven by user feedback, Spark has added SQL and streaming capabilities, introduced Python and R APIs, re-engineered the machine learning libraries, and many other enhancements.

Here are some projects under way to improve Spark:

— Project Tungsten, an ongoing effort to optimize CPU and memory utilization.

— A stable serialization format (possibly Apache Arrow) for external code integration.

— Integration with deep learning frameworks, including TensorFlow and Intel’s new BigDL library.

— A cost-based optimizer for Spark SQL.

— Improved interfaces to data sources.

— Continuing improvements to the Python and R APIs.

Performance improvement is an ongoing mission; for selected operations, Spark 2.0 runs 10X faster than Spark 1.6.

(6) More cool stuff is on the way.

Berkeley’s AMPLab, the source of Spark, Mesos, and Tachyon/Alluxio, is now RISELab. There are four projects under way at RISELab that will extend Spark capabilities:

— Clipper is a prediction serving system that brokers between machine learning frameworks and end-user applications. The first Alpha release, planned for mid-April 2017, will serve scikit-learn, Spark ML and Spark MLLib models, and arbitrary Python functions.

— Drizzle, an execution engine for Apache Spark, uses group scheduling to reduce latency in streaming and iterative operations. Lead developer Shivaram Venkataraman has filed a design document to implement this approach in Spark.

— Opaque is a package for Spark SQL that uses Intel SGX trusted hardware to deliver strong security for DataFrames. The project seeks to enable analytics on sensitive data in an untrusted cloud, with data encryption and access pattern hiding.

— Ray is a distributed execution engine for Spark designed for reinforcement learning.

Three Apache projects in the Incubator build on Spark:

— Apache Hivemall is a scalable machine learning library implemented as a collection of Hive UDFs designed to run on Hive, Pig or Spark SQL with MapReduce, Tez or Spark.

— Apache PredictionIO is a machine learning server built on top of an open source stack, including Spark, HBase, Spray, and Elasticsearch.

— Apache SystemML is a library of machine learning algorithms that run on Spark and MapReduce, originally developed by IBM Research.

MIT’s CSAIL lab is working on ModelDB, a system to manage machine learning models. ModelDB extracts and stores model artifacts and metadata, and makes this data available for easy querying and visualization. The current release supports Spark ML and scikit-learn.

(7) Commercial vendors are building on top of Spark.

The future of analytics is a hybrid stack, with open source at the bottom and commercial software for business users at the top. Here is a small sample of vendors who are building easy-to-use interfaces atop Spark.

— Alpine Data provides a collaboration environment for data science and machine learning that runs on Spark (and other platforms.)

— AtScale, an OLAP on Big Data solution, leverages Spark SQL and other SQL engines, including Hive, Impala, and Presto.

— Dataiku markets Data Science Studio, a drag-and-drop data science workflow tool with connectors for many different storage platforms, scikit-learn, Spark ML and XGboost.

— StreamAnalytix, a drag-and-drop platform for real-time analytics, supports Spark SQL and Spark Streaming, Apache Storm, and many different data sources and sinks.

— Zoomdata, an early adopter of Spark, offers an agile visualization tool that works with Spark Streaming and many other platforms.

All of the leading agile BI tools, including Tableau, Qlik, and PowerBI, support Spark. Even stodgy old Oracle’s Big Data Discovery tool runs on Spark in Oracle Cloud.

(8) All of the leading commercial advanced analytics platforms use Spark.

All of them, including SAS, a company that embraces open source the way Sylvester the Cat embraces a skunk. SAS supports Spark in SAS Data Loader for Hadoop, one of SAS’ five different Hadoop architectures. (If you don’t like SAS architecture, wait six months for another.)

screen-shot-2017-02-13-at-12-30-38-pm
Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms, 2016

— IBM embraces Spark like Romeo embraced Juliet, hopefully with a better ending. IBM contributes heavily to the Spark project and has rebuilt many of its software products and cloud services to use Spark.

— KNIME’s Spark Executor enables users of the KNIME Analytics Platform to create and execute Spark applications. Through a combination of visual programming and scripting, users can leverage Spark to access data sources, blend data, train predictive models, score new data, and embed Spark applications in a KNIME workflow.

— RapidMiner’s Radoop module supports visual programming across SparkR, PySpark, Pig, and HiveQL, and machine learning with SparkML and H2O.

— Statistica, which is no longer part of Dell, offers Spark integration in its Expert and Enterprise editions.

— Microsoft supports Spark in AzureHD, and it has rebuilt Microsoft R Server’s Hadoop integration to leverage Spark as well as MapReduce. VentureBeat reports that Databricks will offer its managed service for Spark on Microsoft Azure later this year.

— SAP, another early adopter of Spark, supports Vora, a connector to SAP HANA.

You get the idea. Spark is deeply embedded in the ecosystem, and it’s foolish to argue that it doesn’t play a central role in the future of analytics.

2016 Big Analytics Predictions Roundup

Before publishing my own predictions for 2016 later this week, I thought it would be fun to round up published predictions on analytics and Big Data.  Looking through this list, I see a few patterns:

— Streaming is hot.  Analysts do not seem to understand distinctions between streaming data, streaming analytics and real-time decisioning.

— “Data Science” continues to be a term that means whatever you like.

— Security and anti-fraud analytics will be a thing in 2016.  (They were also a thing in 2015.)

— Industry analysts are divided about whether or not the analytics talent crunch will persist.

— IoT is a great concept for selling data management tools, but few know how to make sense of it.

On ZDNet, Andrew Brust summarizes 60 predictions from 17 executives and sees the following:

  1. Increased adoption of streaming analytics
  2. Maturation of IoT technologies
  3. Value and maturity in Big Data products
  4. Increased deployment of artificial intelligence and machine learning

On KDnuggets, Gregory Piatetsky reports on five predictions for 2016 from Tom Davenport of the International Institute of Analytics.  (Webinar replay here.)

  1. Cognitive technology will be the next thing after automated analytics.
  2. Analytical microservices will facilitate embedded analytics.
  3. Data Science and predictive analytics will merge.
  4. The analytics talent crunch will ease due to increased enrollment in graduate programs.
  5. Analytics will focus on data curation and management.

Davenport is smoking something if he thinks cognitive computing will be a thing in 2016.

In Forbes, Gil Press synthesizes the IIA’s predictions (above) with predictions from Forrester, IDC and Gartner to get six predictions:

  1. Analytics will be embedded everywhere.
  2. Machine learning will replace manual data wrangling.
  3. The shortage of analytics talent will persist.
  4. Analytics projects will be riskier than typical IT projects.
  5. Cognitive computing will be the next buzzword.  (Press clearly does not agree with Davenport).
  6. Data monetization will take off.

Predictions (2) and (3) conflict with one another; since analysts spend 80% of their time data wrangling, tooling that automates this step will relieve the talent shortage.

On Datanami, Alex Woodie wades through “dozens” of predictions and publishes the 33 most interesting.  Many of these are self-serving, obvious or nonsensical, so I will do the work Woodie’s editor did not do and distill the list to five:

  1. Streaming analytics will mature and prove its worth.
  2. Apache Kafka will be an essential integration point in enterprise infrastructure.
  3. Business user access to Hadoop data will improve.
  4. Spark will significantly displace MapReduce for Hadoop workloads.
  5. Spark processing outside of Hadoop will also increase significantly.

Teryn O’Brien of Silicon Angle reports on a webinar hosted by Alteryx that included Bob Laurent of Alteryx, Clarke Patterson of Cloudera and Francois Ajenstat of Tableau.  The panel offered three predictions:

  1. Analyst jobs will be hot and analysts will be everyday heroes.
  2. Spark, the cloud and IoT will be big in 2016.
  3. Advanced analytics will play a key role in the Presidential election.

On ITPortal, Dell’s Todd O’Brien predicts three things for 2016:

  1. The role of Citizen Data Scientists will expand and evolve.  (Me: WTF?)
  2. Analytics will significantly affect vertical markets, especially manufacturing.
  3. All innovation will trace back to analytics

On the first point, I think that O’Brien is trying to say that companies should buy analytics software that is easy to use, like what Dell offers.

On the FICO blog, FICO’s chief analytics officer Scott Zoldi offers five predictions for 2016:

  1. Streaming analytics will come of age in 2016.
  2. “Prescriptive analytics” (his term for anomaly detection) will be a must-have security technology.
  3. “Lifestyle analytics” (predictions embedded in consumer interactions) will integrate prescriptive analytics into daily life.
  4. Businesses will rethink Big Data governance.
  5. Fake data scientists will emerge.

On a SAS blog, Polly Mitchell-Guthrie predicts five things:

  1. Machine learning (will be) established in the enterprise.
  2. IOT hype hits reality.
  3. Big Data moves beyond hype.
  4. Analytics improve cybersecurity.
  5. Analytics drives increased industry-academic interaction.

It’s standard practice at SAS to call any new IT trend “hype.”

In a press release, the health analytics vendor SCIO Health Analytics makes four predictions for 2016:

  1. Greater focus on educating health consumers.
  2. Demand for more precision in health analytics.
  3. More time will be spent on reimbursement strategies.
  4. The need for data and transparency across domains will increase.

Prediction #1 may be true, but it’s not really about health analytics.

On the Talend blog, CMO Ashley Stirrup predicts four things:

  1. Real-time analytics will take center stage
  2. New business threats will emerge
  3. CIO turnover will accelerate
  4. Businesses will retool

#2 and #4 aren’t really predictions, they simply state the obvious.

2015 in Big Analytics

Looking back at 2015, a few stories stand out:

  • Steady progress for Spark, punctuated by two big announcements.
  • Solid growth in cloud-based machine learning, led by Microsoft.
  • Expanding options for SQL and OLAP on Hadoop.

In 2015, the most widely read post on this blog was Spark is Too Big to Fail, published in April.  I wrote this post in response to a growing chorus of snark about Spark written by folks who seemed to know little about the project and its goals.

IBM Embraces Spark

IBM’s commitment to Spark, announced on Jun 15, lit up the crowds gathered in San Francisco for the Spark Summit.  IBM brings a number of things to Spark: deep pockets to build a community, extensive technical resources and a large customer base.  It also brings a clutter of aging and partially integrated products, an army of suits and no less than 164 Vice Presidents whose titles include the words “Big Data.”

When IBM announced its Spark initiative I joked that somewhere in the bowels of IBM, someone will want to put Spark on a mainframe.  Color me prophetic.

It’s too early to tell what substantive contributions IBM will make to Spark.  Unlike Mesosphere, Typesafe, Tencent, Palantir, Cloudera, Hortonworks, Huawei, Shopify, Netflix, Intel, Yahoo, Kixer, UC Berkeley and Databricks, IBM did not help test Release 1.5 in September.  This is a clear miss, given the scope of IBM’s resources and the volume of hype it puts out about its commitment to the project.

All that said, IBM brings respectability, and the assurance that Spark is ready for prime time.  This is priceless.  Since IBM’s announcement, we haven’t heard a peep from the folks who were snarking at Spark earlier this year.

Cloudera Announces “One Platform” Initiative

In September, Cloudera announced its One Platform initiative to unify Spark and Hadoop, an announcement that surprised everyone who thought Spark and Hadoop were already pretty well integrated.  As with the IBM announcement, the symbolism matters.  Some analysts took this announcement to mean that Cloudera is replacing MapReduce with Spark, which isn’t exactly true.  It’s fairer to say that in Cloudera’s vision, Hadoop users will rely more on Spark in the future than they do today, but MapReduce is not dead.

The “One Platform” positioning has more to do with Cloudera moving to stem the tide of folks who use Spark outside of Hadoop.  According to Databricks’ recent Spark user survey, only 40% use Spark under YARN, with the rest running in a freestanding cluster or on Mesos.  It’s an understandable concern for Cloudera; I’ve never heard a fish seller suggest that we should eat less fish.  But if Cloudera thinks “One Platform” will stem that tide, it is mistaken.  It all boils down to use cases, and there are many use cases for Spark that don’t need Hadoop’s baggage.

Microsoft Builds Credibility in Analytics

In 2015, Microsoft took some big steps to demonstrate that it offers serious solutions for analytics.  The acquisition of Revolution Analytics, announced in January, was the first step; in one move, Microsoft acquired a highly skilled team and valuable software assets.  Since the acquisition, Microsoft has rolled Revolution’s enhanced R distribution into SQL Server and Azure, opening both platforms to the large and growing R community.

Microsoft’s other big move, in February, was the official launch of Azure Machine Learning (AML).   First released in beta in June 2014, AML is both easy to use and powerful.  The UI is simple to understand, and documentation is excellent; built-in analytic functionality is very rich, and the tool is extensible with custom R or Python scripts.  Microsoft’s trial user program is generous, and clearly designed to encourage adoption and use.

Azure Machine Learning contrasts markedly with Amazon Machine Learning.  Amazon’s offering remains a skeleton, with minimal functionality and an API only a developer could love.  Microsoft is clearly making a play for the data science market as a way to leapfrog Amazon.  If analytic capabilities are driving your choice of cloud platform, Azure is by far your best option.

SQL Engines Proliferate

At the beginning of 2015, there were two main options for SQL on Hadoop: Hive for batch SQL and Impala for interactive SQL.  Spark SQL was still in Alpha; Drill was a curiosity; and Presto was something used at Facebook.

Several things happened during the year:

  • Hive on Tez established rough performance parity with the fast SQL engines.
  • Spark SQL went to general release, stabilized, and rolled out the DataFrames API.
  • MapR promoted Drill, and invested in improvements to the software.  Also, MapR’s Drill team spun off and started Dremio to provide commercial support.
  • Cloudera donated Impala to open source, and Pivotal donated Hawq.
  • Teradata placed its chips on Presto.

While it’s great to see so many options emerge, Hive continues to win actual evaluations.  Given Hive’s large user and contributor base and existing stock of programs, it’s unclear how much traction Hive alternatives have now that Hive on Tez offers competitive performance.  Obviously, Cloudera doesn’t think Impala offers a competitive advantage anymore, or they would not have donated the assets to Apache.

The other big news in SQL is TPC’s release of a benchmarking standard for decision support with Big Data.

OLAP on Hadoop Gets Real

For folks seeking to perform dimensional analysis in Hadoop, 2015 delivered not one but two options.  The open source option, Apache Kylin, originally an eBay project, just recently graduated to Apache top level status.  Adoption is limited at present, but any project used by eBay and Baidu is worth a look.

The commercial option is AtScale, a company that emerged from stealth in April.  Unlike BI-on-Hadoop vendors like Datameer and Pentaho, AtScale provides a dimensional layer designed to work with existing BI tools.  It’s a nice value proposition for companies that have already invested big time in BI tools, and don’t want to add another UI to the mix.

Funding for Machine Learning

H2O.ai’s recently announced B round is significant for a couple of reasons.  First, it validates H2O.ai’s true open source business model; second, it confirms the continued growth and expansion of the user base for H2O as well as H2O.ai’s paid subscription base.

Like Sherlock Holmes’ dog that did not bark, two companies are significant because they did not procure funding in 2015:

  • Skytree, whose last funding round closed in April 2013, churned its executive team and rebranded a couple of times.  It finally listed some new customers; interestingly, some are investors and others are affiliated with members of Skytree’s Board.
  • Alpine Data Labs, last funded in November 2013, struggled to distance itself from the Pivotal ecosystem.  Designed to run on Greenplum, Alpine offers limited functionality on Hadoop, which makes it unclear how this company survives.

Palantir continued to suck up capital like a whale feeding on krill.

Google TensorFlow

Google open sourced TensorFlow, so now we have sixteen open source Deep Learning frameworks instead of just fifteen.