The website or mobile app is the storefront for participating in the modern digital era. It’s your portal for inviting users to come and survey your products and services. Much attention focuses on front-end development; this is where the HMTL5, CSS, and JavaScript are coded to develop the landing page that everyone sees when they visit your site.

But the real magic happens on the backend. This is the ecosystem that really powers your website. One writer has articulated this point very nicely as follows:

The technology and programming that “power” a site—what your end user doesn’t see but what makes the site run—is called the back end. Consisting of the server, the database, and the server-side applications, it’s the behind-the-scenes functionality—the brain of a site. …

For the majority of us who have grown accustomed to a Windows environment over the years, Linux can seem like another world. In essence, Linux is a free open-source operating system that has gained increasing popularity since its release in 1991. Linux is based on the whole Unix ecosystem of operating systems that grew out of Bell Laboratories in the early 1970s. Linux has been around for almost 25 years and grew immensely in the late 1990s and early 2000s when it became associated with the LAMP web development stack; Linux stands for the ‘L’ in the acronym of popular tools, along with Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python.

The main difference that …

The Big Data explosion in recent years has created a vast number of new technologies in the area of data processing, storage, and management. One of the biggest names to appear on the scene is Hadoop. In case you need a quick review, Hadoop is a Big Data storage system that takes in large amounts of data from servers and breaks it into smaller, manageable chunks. The technology is complex but at a high level the Hadoop ecosystem essentially takes a “divide and conquer” approach to processing Big Data instead of processing data in tables, as in a relational database like Oracle or MySQL.

One projection expects …

Since 2011 e-commerce has grown from $856,000,000.00 to closing out 2013 at more than $1,248,000,000,000.00 in global revenues, a nearly 41% growth rate over a two year span. The forecast for 2014  is targeted at $1,500,000,000,000.00, another 20% increase is gross revenues (see chart below). With trillions of dollars in play year on year now, and astounding revenue growth rates still ahead, it is critical that any e-commerce site be diligently monitoring not just their website uptime, but more importantly their Web applications. Obviously it is critical that your customers be able to get to your website, but if it doesn’t build fast and complete client requests and transactions even faster then you will be losing clients and revenue at an alarming rate. The latest figures show that if your site doesn’t do a full page load in 3 seconds or less, …

In Part 1 we started our study of Amazon Services and looked at Amazon EC2. In this part, we will look at other Amazon services like EMR, DynamoDB and RDS.

1. 1.      Amazon Elastic Map Reduce

Amazon EMR is a web service which makes cloud computing very easy. Amazon’s EMR cluster comes preconfigured with Hadoop, which as mentioned earlier is a data processing and storage framework. This preconfiguration makes it very easy to start analysing your data in no time. Amazon EMR has applications in machine learning, financial analysis, bioinformatics etc.

Just like EC2, you can launch any number of EMR instances as you need and you will only be charged for the computing power you have used. EMR is preconfigured …

In the previous article we introduced Hadoop as the most popular Big Data toolset on the market today. We had just started talking about MapReduce as the major framework that makes Hadoop distinctive. So let’s continue the discussion where we left off.

MapReduce is really the key to understanding Hadoop’s parallel processing functionality as it enables data in various formats (XML, text, binary, log, SQL, ect) to be divided up and mapped out to many computers nodes and then recombined back to produce a final data set.

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In Part 3 of this series we found out that Big Data is a huge revenue generator for business that is expected to drive $232 billion in spending through 2016. In this installment we’ll continue to explore why Big Data must become a critical part of any business strategy in the 21st century.

First, the Bad News

Okay, so we get the notion of what Big Data is and why it’s important for business. So what can be done about it? The first point is to recognize your business strategy and needs as well as the limitations in your current infrastructure. Traditional organizational data warehouses are based on structured, well-organized data sets. Think Oracle, MySQL, and relational databases . . . that nicely organize data in tables and …