Microsoft Azure

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:

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.

The Year in Machine Learning (Part One)

This is the first installment in a four-part review of 2016 in machine learning and deep learning.

In the first post, we look back at ML/DL news organized in five high-level topic areas:

Concerns about bias
Interpretable models
Deep learning accelerates
Supercomputing goes mainstream
Cloud platforms build ML/DL stacks

In Part Two, we cover developments in each of the leading open source machine learning and deep learning projects.

Parts Three and Four will review the machine learning and deep learning moves of commercial software vendors.

Concerns About Bias

As organizations expand the use of machine learning for profiling and automated decisions, there is growing concern about the potential for bias. In 2016, reports in the media documented racial bias in predictive models used for criminal sentencing, discriminatory pricing in automated auto insurance quotes, an image classifier that learned “whiteness” as an attribute of beauty, and hidden stereotypes in Google’s word2vec algorithm.

Two bestsellers were published in 2016 that address the issue. The first, Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction, is a candidate for the National Book Award. In a review for The Wall Street Journal, Jo Craven McGinty summarizes O’Neil’s arguments as “algorithms aren’t biased, but the people who build them may be.”

A second book, Virtual Competition, written by Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice Stucke, focuses on the ways that machine learning and algorithmic decisions can promote price discrimination and collusion. Burton Malkiel notes in his review that the work “displays a deep understanding of the internet world and is outstandingly researched. The polymath authors illustrate their arguments with relevant case law as well as references to studies in economics and behavioral psychology.”

Most working data scientists are deeply concerned about bias in the work they do. Bias, after all, is a form of error, and a biased algorithm is an inaccurate algorithm. The organizations that employ data scientists, however, may not commit the resources needed for testing and validation, which is how we detect and correct bias. Moreover, people in business suits often exaggerate the accuracy and precision of predictive models or promote their use for inappropriate applications.

In Europe, GDPR creates an incentive for organizations that use machine learning to take the potential for bias more seriously. We’ll be hearing more about GDPR in 2017.

Interpretable Models

Speaking of GDPR, beginning in 2018, organizations that use machine learning to drive automated decisions must be prepared to explain those decisions to the affected subjects and to regulators. As a result, in 2016 we saw considerable interest in efforts to develop interpretable machine learning algorithms.

— The MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory announced progress in developing neural networks that deliver explanations for their predictions.

— At the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, David Gunning summarized work to date on explainability.

— MIT selected machine learning startup Rulex as a finalist in its Innovation Showcase. Rulex implements a technique called Switching Neural Networks to learn interpretable rule sets for classification and regression.

— In O’Reilly Radar, Marco Tulio Ribeiro, Sameer Singh, and Carlos Guestrin explained Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME), a technique that explains the predictions of any machine learning classifier.

— The Wall Street Journal reported on an effort by Capital One to develop machine learning techniques that account for the reasoning behind their decisions.

In Nautilus, Aaron M. Bornstein asked: Is artificial intelligence permanently inscrutable? There are several issues, including a lack of clarity about what “interpretability” means.

It is important to draw a distinction between “interpretability by inspection” versus “functional” interpretability. We do not evaluate an automobile by disassembling its engine and examining the parts; we get behind the wheel and take it for a drive. At some point, we’re all going to have to get behind the idea that you evaluate machine learning models by how they behave and not by examining their parts.

Deep Learning Accelerates

In a September Fortune article, Roger Parloff explains why deep learning is suddenly changing your life. Neural networks and deep learning are not new techniques; we see practical applications emerge now for three reasons:

— Computing power is cheap and getting cheaper; see the discussion below on supercomputing.

— Deep learning works well in “cognitive” applications, such as image classification, speech recognition, and language translation.

— Researchers are finding new ways to design and train deep learning models.

In 2016, the field of DL-driven cognitive applications reached new milestones:

— A Microsoft team developed a system that recognizes conversational speech as well as humans do. The team used convolutional and long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks built with Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK).

— On the Google Research Blog, a Google Brain team announced the launch of the Google Neural Machine Translation System, a system based on deep learning that is currently used for 18 million translations per day.

— In TechCrunch, Ken Weiner reported on advances in DL-driven image recognition and how they will transform business.

Venture capitalists aggressively funded startups that leverage deep learning in applications, especially those that can position themselves in the market for cognitive solutions:

— Affectiva, which uses deep learning to read facial expressions in digital video, closed on a $14 million “D” round led by Fenox Venture Capital.

— Clarifai, a startup that offers a DL-driven image and video recognition service, landed a $30 million Series B round led by Menlo Ventures.

— Zebra Medical Vision, an Israeli startup, uses DL to examine medical images and diagnose diseases of the bones, brain, cardiovascular system, liver, and lungs. Zebra disclosed a $12 million venture round led by Intermountain Health.

There is an emerging ecosystem of startups that are building businesses on deep learning. Here are six examples:

— Deep Genomics, based in Toronto, uses deep learning to understand diseases, disease mutations and genetic therapies.

— Cybersecurity startup Deep Instinct uses deep learning to predict, prevent, and detect threats to enterprise computing systems.

— Ditto Labs uses deep learning to identify brands and logos in images posted to social media.

— Enlitic offers DL-based patient triage, disease screening, and clinical support to make medical professionals more productive.

— Gridspace provides conversational speech recognition systems based on deep learning.

— Indico offers DL-driven tools for text and image analysis in social media.

And, in a sign that commercial development of deep learning isn’t all hype and bubbles, NLP startup Idibon ran out of money and shut down. We can expect further consolidation in the DL tools market as major vendors with deep pockets ramp up their programs. The greatest opportunity for new entrants will be in specialized applications, where the founders can deliver domain expertise and packaged solutions to well-defined problems.

Supercomputing Goes Mainstream

To make deep learning practical, you need a lot of computing horsepower. In 2016, hardware vendors introduced powerful new platforms that are purpose-built for machine learning and deep learning.

While GPUs are currently in the lead, there is a serious debate under way about the relative merits of GPUs and FPGAs for deep learning. Anand Joshi explains the FPGA challenge. In The Next Platform, Nicole Hemsoth describes the potential of a hybrid approach that leverages both types of accelerators. During the year, Microsoft announced plans to use Altera FPGAs, and Baidu said it intends to standardize on Xilinx FPGAs.

NVIDIA Launches the DGX-1

NVIDIA had a monster 2016, tripling its market value in the course of the year. The company released the DGX-1, a deep learning supercomputer. The DGX-1 includes eight Tesla P100 GPUs, each of which is 12X faster than NVIDIA’s previous benchmark. For $129K you get the throughput of 250 CPU-based servers.

NVIDIA also revealed a Deep Learning SDK with Deep Learning primitives, math libraries, tools for multi-GPU communication, a CUDA toolkit and DIGITS, a model training system. The system works with popular Deep Learning frameworks like Caffe, CNTK, TensorFlow, and Theano.

Tech media salivated:

ExtremeTech: “Is there anything a computer can’t do?”
Gizmodo: “Stupidly powerful.”
Engadget: “Insane.”
TechReport: “Holy mother of GPUs.”

MIT Technology Review interviewed NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, who is now Wall Street’s favorite tech celebrity.

Separately, Karl Freund reports on NVIDIA’s announcements at the SC16 supercomputing show.

Early users of the DGX-1 include BenevolentAI, PartnersHealthCare, Argonne and Oak Ridge Labs, New York University, Stanford University, the University of Toronto, SAP, Fidelity Labs, Baidu, and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre. Nicole Hemsoth explains how NVIDIA supports cancer research with its deep learning supercomputers.

Cray Releases the Urika-GX

Cray launched the Urika-GX, a supercomputing appliance that comes pre-loaded with Hortonworks Data Platform, the Cray Graph Engine, OpenStack management tools and Apache Mesos for configuration. Inside the box: Intel Xeon Broadwell cores, 22 terabytes of memory, 35 terabytes of local SSD storage and Cray’s high-performance network interconnect. Cray ships 16, 32 or 48 nodes in a rack in the third quarter, larger configurations later in the year.

Intel Responds

The headline on the Wired story about Google’s deep learning chip — Time for Intel to Freak Out — looks prescient. Intel acquired Nervana Systems, a 28-month-old startup working on hardware and software solutions for deep learning. Re/code reported a price tag of $408 million. The customary tech media unicorn story storm ensues.

Intel said it plans to use Nervana’s software to improve the Math Kernel Library and market the Nervana Engine alongside the Xeon Phi processor. Nervana neon is YADLF — Yet Another Deep Learning Framework — that ranked twelfth in usage among deep learning frameworks in KDnuggets’ recent poll. According to Nervana, neon benchmarks well against Caffe; but then, so does CNTK.

Paul Alcorn offers additional detail on Intel’s new Xeon CPU and Deep Learning Inference Accelerator. In Fortune, Aaron Pressman argues that Intel’s strategy for machine learning and AI is smart, but lags NVIDIA. Nicole Hemsoth describes Intel’s approach as “war on GPUs.”

Separately, Intel acquired Movidius, the folks who put a deep learning chip on a memory stick.

Cloud Platforms Build ML/DL Stacks

Machine learning use cases are inherently well-suited to cloud platforms. Workloads are ad hoc and project oriented; model training requires huge bursts of computing power for a short period. Inference workloads are a different matter, which is one of many reasons one should always distinguish between training and inference when choosing platforms.

Amazon Web Services

After a head fake earlier in the year when it publishing DSSTNE, a deep learning project that nobody wants, AWS announces that it will standardize on MXNet for deep learning. Separately, AWS launched three new machine learning managed services:

— Rekognition, for image recognition

— Polly, for text to speech

— Lex, a conversational chatbot development platform

In 2014, AWS was first to market among the cloud platforms with GPU-accelerated computing services. In 2016, AWS added P2 instances with up to 16 Tesla K8- GPUs.

Released in 2015 as CNTK, Microsoft rebranded its deep learning framework as Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit and released Version 2.0, with a new Python API and many other enhancements. The company also launched 22 cognitive APIs in Azure for vision, speech, language, knowledge, and search. Separately, MSFT released its managed service for Spark in Azure HDInsight and continued to enhance Azure Machine Learning.

MSFT also announced the Azure N-Series compute instances powered by NVIDIA GPUs for general availability in December.

Azure is one part of MSFT’s overall strategy in advanced analytics, which I’ll cover in Part Three of this review.

Google Cloud

In February, Google released TensorFlow Serving, an open source inference engine that handles model deployment after training and manages their lifetime. On the Google Research Blog, Noah Fiedel explained.

Later in the Spring, Google announced that it was building its own deep learning chips, or Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). In Forbes, HPC expert Karl Freund dissected Google’s announcement. Freund believes that TPUs are actually used for inference and not for model training; in other words, they replace CPUs rather than GPUs.

Google launched a dedicated team in October to drive Google Cloud Machine Learning, and announced a slew of enhancements to its services:

— Google Cloud Jobs API provides businesses with capabilities to find, match and recommend jobs to candidates. Currently available in a limited alpha.

— Cloud Vision API now runs on Google’s custom Tensor Processing Units; prices reduced by 80%.

— Cloud Translation API will be available in two editions, Standard and Premium.

— Cloud Natural Language API graduates to general availability.

In 2017, GPU-accelerated instances will be available for the Google Compute Engine and Google Cloud Machine Learning. Details here.

IBM Cloud

In 2016, IBM contributed heavily to the growing volume of fake news.

At the Spark Summit in June, IBM announced a service called the IBM Data Science Experience to great fanfare. Experienced observers found the announcement puzzling; the press release described a managed service for Apache Spark with a Jupyter IDE, but IBM already had a managed service for Apache Spark with a Jupyter IDE.

In November, IBM quietly released the service without a press release, which is understandable since there was nothing to crow about. Sure enough, it’s a Spark service with a Jupyter IDE, but also includes an R service with RStudio, some astroturf “community” documents and “curated” data sources that are available for free from a hundred different places. Big Whoop.

In IBM’s other big machine learning move, the company rebranded an existing SPSS service as Watson Machine Learning. Analysts fell all over themselves raving about the new service, apparently without actually logging in and inspecting it.

Of course, IBM says that it has big plans to enhance the service. It’s nice that IBM has plans. We should all aspire to bigger and better things, but keep in mind that while IBM is very good at rebranding stuff other people built, it has never in its history developed a commercially successful software product for advanced analytics.

IBM Cloud is part of a broader strategy for IBM, so I’ll have more to say about the company in Part Three of this review.

Big Analytics Roundup (March 14, 2016)

HPE wins the internet this week by announcing the re-re-release of Haven, this time on Azure. The other big story this week: Flink announces Release 1.0.

Third Time’s a Charm

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announces Haven on Demand on Microsoft Azure; PR firestorm ensues. Haven is a ~~loose bundle of software assets salvaged from the train wreck of Autonomy, Vertica, ArcSight and HP Operations Management~~ machine learning suite, originally branded as HAVEn and announced by HP in June, 2013. Since then, the software hasn’t exactly gone viral; Haven failed to make KDnuggets’ list of the top 50 machine learning APIs last December, a list that includes the likes of Ersatz, Hutoma and Skyttle.

One possible reason for the lack of virality: although several analysts described Haven as “open source”, HP did not release the Haven source code, and did not offer the software under an open source license.

Other than those two things, it’s open source.

In 2015, HP released Haven on Helion Public Cloud, HP’s failed cloud platform.

So this latest announcement is a re-re-release of the software. On paper, the library looks like it has some valuable capabilities in text, images video and audio analytics. The interface and documentation look a bit rough, but, after all, this is a ~~first~~ third release.

Jim’s Latest Musings

Angus Loten of the WSJ’s CIO Journal interviews SAS CEO Jim Goodnight, who increasingly sounds like your great-uncle at Thanksgiving dinner, the one who complains about “these kids today.” Goodnight compares cloud computing to mainframe time sharing. That’s ironic, because although SAS runs in AWS, it does not offer elastic pricing, the one thing that modern cloud computing shares with timesharing.

Goodnight also pooh-poohs IoT, noting that “we don’t have any major IoT customers, and I haven’t seen a good example of IoT yet.” SAS’ Product Manager for IoT could not be reached for comment.

Meanwhile, SAS held its annual analyst conference at a posh resort in Steamboat Springs, Colorado; in his report for Ventana Research, David Menninger gushes.

Herbalife Messes Up, Blames Data Scientists

Herbalife discloses errors reporting non-financial information, blames “database scripting errors.” The LA Times reports; Kaiser Fung comments.

Explainers

— Several items from the morning paper this week:

Adrian Colyer explains CryptoNets, a combination of Deep Learning and homohorphic encryption. By encrypting your data before you load it into the cloud, you make it useless to a hacker.
Adrian explains Neural Turing Machines.
Adrian explains Memory Networks.
Citing a paper published by Google last year, Adrian explains why using personal knowledge questions for account recovery is a really bad thing.

— Data Artisans’ Robert Metzger explains Apache Flink.

— In a video, Eric Kramer explains how to leverage patient data with Dataiku Data Science Studio.

Perspectives

— In InfoWorld, Serdar Yegulalp examines Flink 1.0 and swallows whole the argument that Flink’s “pure” streaming is inherently superior to Spark’s microbatching.

— On the MapR blog, Jim Scott offers a more balanced view of Flink, noting that streaming benchmarks are irrelevant unless you control for processing semantics and fault tolerance. Scott is excited about Flink ease of use and CEP API.

— John Leonard interviews Vincent de Lagabbe, CTO of bitcoin tracker Kaiko, who argues that Hadoop is unnecessary if you have less than a petabyte of data. Lagabbe prefers Datastax Enterprise.

— Also in InfoWorld, Martin Heller reviews Azure Machine Learning, finds it too hard for novices. I disagree. I used AML in a classroom lab, and students were up and running in minutes.

Open Source Announcements

— Flink announces Release 1.0. DataArtisans celebrates.

Teradata Watch

CEO Mike Koehler demonstrates confidence in TDC’s future by selling 11,331 shares.

Commercial Announcements

— Objectivity announces that Databricks has certified ThingSpan, a graph analytics platform, to work with Spark and HDFS.

— Databricks announces that adtech company Sellpoints has selected the Databricks platform to deliver a predictive analytics product.

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.

Microsoft Buys Revolution Analytics

On Friday, January 23, Microsoft announced an agreement to acquire Revolution Analytics. Coverage of the announcement in the media is extensive, with stories by TechCrunch, Wired, ZDNet, VentureBeat and many others (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.)

Microsoft did not disclose the negotiated purchase price; Revolution’s total capitalization is around $40 million. Given Revolution’s scale of operations, the acquisition will have minimal impact on Microsoft’s near-term revenue and profit.

Many analysts follow Microsoft, but few have heard of Revolution Analytics, and most seem to be stumped by this move. An example:

Question: What is the significance of Microsoft acquiring Revolution Analytics?

Answer: I am not sure.

Microsoft gets four things with this deal:

Instant credibility with the growing open source analytics community
Consulting and support skills to help enterprise customers adopt R
A capable engineering organization (conveniently located in Seattle)
Software bits that should integrate well with the Microsoft stack

In addition to its primary offering, Revolution R Enterprise, Revolution distributes Revolution R Open, an enhanced free distribution of open source R; and Revolution R Cloud an elastic offering on the AWS Marketplace. Revolution R Open is equivalent in many respects to Oracle R Distribution, which is also compiled with the Intel Math Kernel Libraries. Revolution R Plus is commercially supported, and includes additional software bits for enterprise integration; this product is comparable to Oracle R Enterprise.

Revolution Analytics’ other key software assets include ScaleR, a distributed out-of-memory back end with a strong R interface; DeployR, a component that supports enterprise deployment of web-based applications; and DevelopR, a Windows-based IDE.

While the IDE has a number of useful features, it requires significant investment to compete effectively with RStudio, which has won the hearts and minds of R users. Upgrading software simply to make it competitive with a “free” competitor strikes me as a dubious commercial move; it seems more likely that Microsoft will add an R capability to the Visual Studio suite.

Revolution’s ScaleR back end enables R users to leverage a platform for distributed analytics. ScaleR already runs on Windows Server HPC clusters, which should make integration with Azure a straightforward matter. This is important for Microsoft, since Azure Machine Learning currently maxes out at around 10Gb.

ScaleR’s integration with Hadoop currently runs through MapReduce; competing best-in-class Hadoop analytics (such as Spark, H2O, Skytree and SAS) run in memory for better performance. Microsoft’s deep pockets give Revolution the means to make this product competitive.