Big Data Analytics with Java and Python, using Cloud Dataproc, Google’s Fully-Managed Spark and Hadoop Service
Introduction
There is little question, big data analytics, data science, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML), a subcategory of AI, have all experienced a tremendous surge in popularity over the last few years. Behind the hype curves and marketing buzz, these technologies are having a significant influence on all aspects of our modern lives.
However, installing, configuring, and managing the technologies that support big data analytics, data science, ML, and AI, at scale and in Production, often demands an advanced level of familiarity with Linux, distributed systems, cloud- and container-based platforms, databases, and data-streaming applications. The mere ability to manage terabytes and petabytes of transient data is beyond the capability of many enterprises, let alone performing analysis of that data.
To ease the burden of implementing these technologies, the three major cloud providers, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, all have multiple Big Data Analytics-, AI-, and ML-as-a-Service offerings. In this post, we will explore one such cloud-based product offering in the field of big data analytics, Google Cloud Dataproc. We will focus on Cloud Dataproc’s ability to quickly and efficiently run Spark jobs written in Java and Python, two widely adopted enterprise programming languages.
