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Big Data In The Cloud

by Roopesh Shenoy on Nov 21, 2012 |

Big Data services available from cloud computing vendors such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google are uncovering interesting trends and opportunities.

Big-Data-and-Analytics-as-a-service is recognized as the next big thing by several independent industry analysts. Leading cloud providers as well as pure-play service providers are already offering their own solutions packaging both proprietary and open source software. For example -

Amazon recently announced a separate category for Big Data in AWS Marketplace
Microsoft has similar offerings through Windows Azure and Windows Azure Market Place
Google BigQuery is a proprietary offering from Google that allows analyzing huge data sets
Some others such as 1010data (1010data itself has been providing cloud-based analytics for more than a decade)

The main advantage of these offerings is that the infrastructure required to crunch data, as well as installation and configuration details, are abstracted away from the developers and users in exchange for per-hour pricing. For commercial software such as SAP HANA analytics, the upfront licensing costs are also converted to pay-as-you-go costs. These services can be accessed in various ways, such as query interfaces, programming APIs and even Spreadsheets. Spreadsheet access is especially interesting, since this allows business users to use these services ad hoc.

Thanks to these services, both startups and enterprise users can start experimenting with or leveraging big data analytics without committing to large upfront investments. In fact, a large number of case studies published by these service providers are of startups.

You can refer to several articles and presentations related to Big-Data on InfoQ.