Getting Started with Apache Zeppelin on Amazon EMR, using AWS Glue, RDS, and S3: Part 1 — Setup

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 3–5 years. Behind the hype cycles and marketing buzz, these technologies are having a significant influence on all aspects of our modern lives. Due to their popularity, commercial enterprises, academic institutions, and the public sector have all rushed to develop hardware and software solutions to decrease the barrier to entry and increase the velocity of ML and Data Scientists and Engineers.

Data Science: 5-Year Search Trend (courtesy Google Trends)

Machine Learning: 5-Year Search Trend (courtesy Google Trends)

Technologies

All three major cloud providers, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, have rapidly maturing big data analytics, data science, and AI and ML services. AWS, for example, introduced Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) in 2009, primarily as an Apache Hadoop-based big data processing service. Since then, according to Amazon, EMR has evolved into a service that uses Apache Spark, Apache Hadoop, and several other leading open-source frameworks to quickly and cost-effectively process and analyze vast amounts of data. More recently, in late 2017, Amazon released SageMaker, a service that provides the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly and securely.

Simultaneously, organizations are building solutions that integrate and enhance these Cloud-based big data analytics, data science, AI, and ML services. One such example is Apache Zeppelin. Similar to the immensely popular Project Jupyter and the newly open-sourced Netflix’s Polynote, Apache Zeppelin is a web-based, polyglot, computational notebook. Zeppelin enables data-driven, interactive data analytics and document collaboration using a number of interpreters such as Scala (with Apache Spark), Python (with Apache Spark), Spark SQL, JDBC, Markdown, Shell and so on. Zeppelin is one of the core applications supported natively by Amazon EMR.