Chapter 1. Introducing the Big Data Technology Landscape and Analytics Platform

The Big Data paradigm has emerged as one of the most powerful in next-generation data storage, management, and analytics. IT powerhouses have actually embraced the change and have accepted that it's here to stay.

What arrived just as Hadoop, a storage and distributed processing platform, has really graduated and evolved. Today, we have whole panorama of various tools and technologies that specialize in various specific verticals of the Big Data space.

In this chapter, you will become acquainted with the technology landscape of Big Data and analytics platforms. We will start by introducing the user to the infrastructure, the processing components, and the advent of Big Data. We will also discuss the needs and use cases for near real-time analysis.

This chapter will cover the following points that will help you to understand the Big Data technology landscape:

• Infrastructure of Big Data
• Components of the Big Data ecosystem
• Analytics architecture
• Distributed batch processing
• Distributed databases (NoSQL)
• Real-time and stream processing