the architectures aligns with mechanisms and mechanisms

Book Title:

Information Granularity, Big Data, and Computational Intelligence, W. Pedrycz and S.-

M. Chen (eds.), Vol. 8, 2015

Chapter 13: The Role of Cloud Computing Architecture in Big Data

Authors: Mehdi Bahrami and Mukesh Singhal

Cloud Lab, University of California, Merced

http://Cloudlab.UCMerced.edu

Publisher: Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-08254-7_13

URL:

http://goo.gl/0LxxlH

Or

http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-08254-7_13#

Citation:

Mehdi Bahrami and Mukesh Singhal, “The Role of Cloud Computing Architecture in Big Data”,

Information Granularity, Big Data, and Computational Intelligence, Vol. 8, pp. 275-295, Chapter

13, Pedrycz and S.-M. Chen (eds.), Springer, 2015 http://goo.gl/0LxxlH

M. Bahrami and M. Singhal

The Role of Cloud Computing Architecture in Big Data

Mehdi Bahrami 1 and Mukesh Singhal

Abstract In this data-driven society, we are collecting a massive amount of data from people, actions,

sensors, algorithms and the web; handling “Big Data” has become a major challenge. A question still

exists regarding when data may be called big data. How large is big data? What is the correlation between

big data and business intelligence? What is the optimal solution for storing, editing, retrieving, analyzing,

maintaining, and recovering big data? How can cloud computing help in handling big data issues? What

is the role of a cloud architecture in handling big data? How important is big data in business intelligence?

This chapter attempts to answer these questions. First, we review a definition of big data. Second, we

describe the important challenges of storing, analyzing, maintaining, recovering and retrieving a big data.

Third, we address the role of Cloud Computing Architecture as a solution for these important issues that

deal with big data. We also discuss the definition and major features of cloud computing systems. Then

we explain how cloud computing can provide a solution for big data with cloud services and open-source

cloud software tools for handling big data issues. Finally, we explain the role of cloud architecture in big

data, the role of major cloud service layers in big data, and the role of cloud computing systems in

handling big data in business intelligence models.

Keywords Big Data ∙ Cloud Computing ∙ Cloud Architecture ∙ Business Intelligence

1 Introduction

Capturing data from different sources allows a business to use Business Intelligence (BI) [1] capabilities.

These sources could be consumer information, service information, products, advertising logs, and related

information such as the history of product sales or customer transactions. When an organization uses BI

1 Mehdi Bahrami . Mukesh Singhal,

Cloud Lab, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, University of California, Merced, USA

IEEE Senior Member, email: [email protected]

Mukesh Singhal

Chancellor’s Professor, Email: [email protected]

Role of Cloud Computing Architectures in Big Data

technology to improve services, we characterize it as a “smart organization” [1]. The smart features of

these organizations have different levels which depend on the accuracy of decisions; greater accuracy of

data analysis provides “smarter” organizations.

For this reason, we are collecting a massive amount of data from people, actions, sensors, algorithms,

and the web which forms “Big Data.” This digital data collection grows exponentially each year.

According to [2], big data refers to datasets whose size is beyond the ability of typical database software

tools and applications to capture, store, manage and analyze.

An important task of any organization is to analyze data. Analysis could change a large volume of data

to a smaller amount of valuable data, but we still require collecting a massive amount of data.

Big data has become a complex issue in all disciplines of science. In scientific big data, several

solutions have been proposed to overcoming big data issues in the field of life sciences [3, 4], education

systems [5], material sciences [6], social networks [7, 8] and.

Some examples of the significance of big data for generating, collecting and computing are listed as

follows:

Big data generation and collection:

● It is predicated that data production will be 44 times greater in 2020 than it was in 2009 [9].

This data could be collected from variety resources, such as traditional databases, videos,

images, binary files (applications) and text files;

● It is estimated 235 Terabytes of data were collected by the U.S. Library of Congress in April

2011 [10];

● Facebook stores, accesses, and analyzes 30+ Petabytes of user generated data [11] which

includes a variety of data, such as images, videos and texts.

Computing on big data:

● In 2008, Google was processing 20,000 Terabytes of data (20 petabytes) per day [12].

● Decoding the human genome originally took 10 years to process; now it can be achieved in one

week [13] with distributing computing on big data.

● IDC 1 estimates that by 2020, business-to-business and business-to-consumer transactions on the

Internet will reach 450 billion per day [14].

● Big data is a top business priority and drives enormous opportunities for business

improvement. Wikibon’s own study projects that big data will be a $50 billion business by

1 International Data Corporation (IDC) is an American market research, analysis and advisory firm specializing in information

technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology.

M. Bahrami and M. Singhal

2017 [15].

● Macy's Inc. provides a real-time pricing. The retailer adjusts pricing in near real-time for 73

million items for sale based on demand and inventory [16].

● The major VISA process more than 172,800,000 card transactions each day [17].

The most public resource data are available on the Internet, such as multimedia steam data, social

media data and text. This variety of data shows we are not facing only structured data, but also

unstructured data, such as multimedia files (including video, audio and images), and Twitter and

Facebook comments. Unstructured data causes complexity and difficulty in analyzing big data. For

example, a corporation analyzes user comments and user shared data on social media that could recognize

customer favorites and provide best offers.

To collect and process big data, we can use Cloud Computing Technology. Cloud computing is a new

paradigm for hosting clusters of data and delivering different services over a network or the Internet.

Hosting clusters of data allows customers to store and compute a massive amount of data on the cloud.

This paradigm allows customers to pay on pay-per-use basis and enables them to grow (or shrink) their

computing and storage needs on demand. These features allow customers to pay the infrastructure for

storing and computing based on their current capacity of big data and transactions.

Currently, capturing and processing big data are related to improving the global economy, science,

social affair, education and national security; processing of big data allows us to propose accurate

decisions and acquire knowledge from raw data.

This chapter aims to show the role of cloud computing in dealing with big data and intelligent

computing. This chapter is organized as follows: Section 2 discusses a definition and characteristics of big

data. In Section 3, we discuss important opportunities and challenges in handling big data. In Section 4,

we discuss cloud computing and key architectural components for dealing with big data. In this section,

we review how each service layer of a cloud computing system could handle big data issues. Also, we

provide a list of services and tools for dealing with big data. Finally, in Section 5, we review some major

cloud computing issues.

2 Big Data Definition

Often big data is characterized by “4 V’s” [18] which stand for:

● “Volume” which indicates a very large volume of data;

● “Velocity” which indicates the speed for data processing in terms of response time. This response

Role of Cloud Computing Architectures in Big Data

time could be a batch, real-time or stream response-time;

● “Variety” which indicates heterogeneity in data that we have collected for processing and

analysis this data variety includes structured, unstructured and semi-structured data;

● “Veracity” which indicates level of accuracy in the data. For example, a sensor that generates

data can have a wrong value rather than provides an accurate data.

Big data could have one or multiple of the above characteristics. For example, storing and computing

on social data could have a very large volume of data (volume) and specific response-time for computing

(velocity) but it may not have variety and veracity characteristics.

Another example, analyzing public social media data regarding the purchase history of a customer

could provide a future favorite purchase list when she searches for a new product. In this case, big data

have all characteristics: volume of data, because collecting a massive amount of data from public social

media networks; velocity, because response-time limited to near real-time when a customer search a

product; variety, because big data may come from different sources (social media and purchase history);

lack of veracity, because data from customers in social media networks may have uncertainty. For

instance, a customer could like a product in a social media network, not because this is the product of her

choice, but because of this product is used by her friend.

Another important question in big data is, “How large is big data?” We can answer this question

based on our current technology. For example, Adam Jacobs [19] states in the late 1980s at Columbia

University that they stored 100 GB of data as big data via an IBM 3850 MSS (Mass Storage System),

which costs $40K per GB. In 2010, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) facility at CERN produced 13

petabytes of data [20]. So what we call big data depends on the cost, speed and capacity of existing

computing and storage technologies. For example, in the 1980s, 100 GB was big data because the storage

technology was expensive at that time and it had low performance. However, by 2010, the LHC processed

13 Petabyte as a big data which has 1.363*10 5 times more volume than IBM 3850 MSS big data in 1980s.

At this time, we can refer to 13 petabytes at CERN. In addition, we can also refer to a text file with 10

GB size as big data because a regular text editor could not handle this file size. So the definition of big

data is not only a massive amount of data but also depends on what the technology and which size of big

data that technology could handle.

M. Bahrami and M. Singhal

3 Big Data Opportunities and Challenges

On one hand, when we collect big data, we have an opportunity to make an accurate decision through

BI. BI is a set of theories and technologies that aim to transfer data from raw-data into meaningful and

useful information for business processes (BP). BI became popular in the 1990s, and Business Analytics

(BA), which is an analytical component in BI, became popular in the 2000s. In the traditional model, the

queries are pre-defined to confirm or refuse a query’s hypotheses, but Online Analytical Processing

(OLAP) analysis emerges as an approach to answer complex analytical queries. For example, in a car

accident we can make a decision about the incident based on driver information. However, when we

collect GPS information, engine information and driver information, we can make a more accurate

decision about an accident. Also, if we collect more information, we can trust our decision more

(veracity). In a second example, Volvo provided performance and fault monitoring for predictive warranty

analysis [22]. In another example, sensor data from a cross-country flight (New York to Los Angeles)

generate 2.499 billion Terabyte per year [23] (volume) from different sensors (variety), which could be

provided from reliable sensors (veracity) or unreliable sensors (lack of veracity). Often the processing of

this data is real-time (velocity) and this computing could be processed by an aircraft’s server or by a

ground’s servers.

Collection of information cannot only help us to avoid car accidents, but also could help to make an

accurate decision in any systems, such as business financial systems [15], education systems [24], and

treatment systems, e.g., Clinical Decision Support Systems [25].

Some important opportunities are provided by big data. They are listed as follows:

 Analyze big data to improve business processes and business plans, and to achieve business plan

goals for a target organization (The target organization could be a corporation, industry, education

system, financial system, government system or global system.)

 Reduce bulk data to a valuable smaller amount of data

 Provide more accurate decisions by analyzing big data

 Prevent future system failures by predicting big data

On the other hand, we have several issues with big data. The challenges of big data happened in

various domains including storing of big data, computing on big data and transferring of big data. We

discuss these issues below:

● Storage Issues

A database is a structured collection of data. In the late 1960s, flat-file models which were expensive

Role of Cloud Computing Architectures in Big Data

and slow, used for storing data. For these reasons, relational databases emerged in the 1970s. Relational

Database Management Systems (RDBMS) employ Structured Query Language (SQL) to store, edit and

retrieve data.

Lack of support for unstructured data led to the emergence of new technologies, such as

BLOB (Binary Large Object) in the 2000s. Unstructured data may refer to multimedia data. Also

unstructured data may refer to irregularly or randomly repeated column patterns that vary from row to

row within each file or document. BLOB could store all data types in most RDBMS.

In addition, a massive amount of data could not use SQL databases because retrieving data and

analyzing data takes more time for processing. So “NOSQL”, which stands for “Not Only SQL” and “Not

Relational”, was designed to overcome this issue. NOSQL is a scalable partitioned table that could

distribute data over many servers. NOSQL is implemented for cloud computing because in the cloud, a

data storage server could be added or removed anytime. This capability allows for the addition of

unlimited data storage servers to the cloud.

This technology allows organizations to collect a variety of data but still increasing the volume of data

increases cost investment. For this reason, capturing high-quality data that could be more useful for an

organization rather than collecting a bulk of data.

● Computing Issues

When we store big data, we need to retrieve, analyze and modify it. The important part of collecting

data is analyzing big data and converting raw data into valuable information that could improve a

business process or decision making. This challenge can be addressed by employing a cluster of CPUs

and RAMs in cloud computing technology.

High-Performance Computing (HPC) is another technology that provides a distributed solutions by

different computing models, such as traditional (e.g. Grid Computing) or cloud computing for scientific

and engineering problems. Most of these problems could not process data in a polynomial time-

complexity.

● Transfer Issues

Transfer of big data is another issue. In this challenge, we are faced with several sub-issues: Transfer

Speed, which indicates how fast we can transfer data from one location/site to another location/site. For

example, transferring of DNA, which is a type of big data, from China to the United States has some

delay in the backbone of the Internet, which causes a problem when they receive data in the United States

[26]. BGI (one of the largest producers of genomic data, Beijing Genomics Institute in Shenzen, China)

M. Bahrami and M. Singhal

could transfer 50 DNAs with an average size of 0.4 terabyte through the Internet in 20 days, which is not

an acceptable performance [26].

Traffic Jam: transfer of big data could happened between two local sites, cities or worldwide via the

Internet but between any locations this transfer will result in a very large traffic jam.

Accuracy and Privacy: Often we transfer big data through unsecured networks, such as the Internet.

Data transfers through the Internet must be kept secure from unauthorized access. Accuracy aims to

transfer data without missing any bits.

4 Dealing with Big Data

Several traditional solutions have emerged for dealing with big data such as Supercomputing,

Distributed Computing, Parallel Computing, and Grid Computing. However, elastic scalability is

important in big data which could be supported by cloud computing services which are described in

Section 4.2. Cloud computing has several capabilities for supporting big data which are related to

handling of big data. Cloud computing could support two major issues of big data, which are described in

Section 3 including storing of big data and computing of big data. Cloud computing provides a cluster of

resources (storage and computing) that could be added anytime. These features allow cloud computing to

become an emerging technology for dealing with big data.

In this section, we will first review important features of cloud computing systems and a correlation of

each of them to big data. Second, we discuss a cloud architecture and the role of each service layer in

handling big data. Finally, we review implementation models of cloud computing systems as they relate

to handling big data.

4.1. Cloud Computing System Features

The major characteristics of cloud computing as defined by the U.S. National Institute of Standards

and Technology (NIST) [27] are as follows:

 On-demand Elastic Service

This characteristics show the following features: (i) an economical model of cloud computing which

enables consumers to order required services (computing machines and/or storage devices). The service

requested service could scale rapidly upward or downward on demand; (ii) it is a machine responsibility

that does not require any human to control the requested services. The cloud architecture manages on-

demand requests (increase or decrease in service requests), availability, allocation, subscription and the

customer’s bill.

Role of Cloud Computing Architectures in Big Data

This feature is interesting for a start-up businesses, because this feature of cloud computing systems

allows a business to start with traditional data or normal datasets (in particular start-up business) and

increase their datasets to big data as they receive requests from customers or their data grows during the

business progress.

 Resource pooling

A cloud vendor provides a pool of resources (e.g., computing machines, storage devices and network)

to customers. The cloud architecture manages all available resources via global and local managers for

different sites and local sites, respectively.

This feature allows big data to be distributed on different servers which is not possible by traditional

models, such as supercomputing systems.

● Service Accessibility

A cloud vendor provides all services through broadband networks (often via the Internet). The offered

services are available via web-based model or heterogeneous client applications [28]. The web-based

model could be an Application Programming Interface (API), web-services, such as Web Service

Description Language (WSDL). Also heterogeneous client applications are provided by the vendors.

Customers could run applications on heterogeneous client systems, such as Windows, Android and Linux.

This feature enables partners to contribute to big data. These partners could provide cloud software

applications, infrastructure or data. For example, several applications from different sites could connect to

a single-data or transparent multiple-data warehouse for capturing, analyzing or processing of big data.

● Measured Service

Cloud vendors charge customers by a metering capability that provides billing for a subscriber, based

on pay-per-use model. This service of cloud architecture manages all cloud service pricing, subscriptions

and metering of used services. This capability of cloud computing system allows an organization to pay

for the current size of datasets and then pay more when dataset size increases. This service allows

customers to start with a low investment.

4.2. Cloud Architecture

Cloud computing technology could provide by a vendor that enables IT departments to focus on their

software development rather than hardware maintenance, security maintenance, recovery maintenance,

operating systems and software upgrades. Also, if an IT department establishes a cloud computing system

in their organization, could help them to handle big data.

The Architecture of a cloud computing system is specific to the overall system and requirements of

M. Bahrami and M. Singhal

each component and sub-components. Cloud architecture allows cloud vendors to analyze, design,

develop and implement big data.

Cloud vendors provide services through service layers in cloud computing systems. The major

categories are divided into four service layers: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service

(PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Business Intelligence (BI) and other service layers assigned to

the major service layers as shown in Figure 1, such as Data-as-a-Service(DaaS) assigned to IaaS layer.

Description of each service discussed in Section 4.2.5.

Figure 1. Cloud Services

4.2.1. The Role of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

The IaaS model offers storage, processors and fundamental hardware to the cloud customers. This

model covers several services, such as firmware, hardware, utilities, data, databases, resources and

infrastructure. This model allows clients to install operating systems, receive quoted infrastructure, and

develop and deploy required software applications. This model is often implemented via Virtualization,

which enables multi users/tenants work on share machines with his own privacy.

The IaaS model provides several opportunities for big data: (i) storage data: this feature allows

customers to store big data. Storage on the cloud computing system enables customers to store, retrieve

and edit big data by employing a cluster of storage devices. These clusters could be added or removed

dynamically; (ii) hardware: this feature enables customers have an access to a resource pool of hardware

for big data. This feature could be used for capture data, such as through sensors, Radio-Frequency

Identifications (RFIDs) or Communication-as-a-Service (CaaS). The CaaS is responsible for the required

hardware and software for delivering Voice-over-IP (VoIP), audio and video conferencing. The hardware

PaaS

SaaS

BI

Testing aaS Simulation Software aaS

Data aaS

Business Process aaS

Privacy aaS

DBaaS

IaaS Firmware aaS

Robot aaS

Business Intelligence aaS

IT aaS

Role of Cloud Computing Architectures in Big Data

feature also provides network access and network traffic control that could to transfer big data.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides virtual and scalable computing systems at

the IaaS. Amazon EC2 customers could define instances of a variety of operating systems (OSs). Each OS

and required hardware, such as CPUs and RAMs could be customized by a customer on the fly.

Customers should create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) in order to use Amazon EC2. The AMI

contains the required applications, operating systems (the customer could select various operating systems

such as Windows or Linux versions), libraries, data and system configuration. Amazon EC2 uses Amazon

S3, which is a cloud storage service and stores data and uploads AMI into S3.

The impact of big data in this service layer is higher than other service models in cloud computing

systems, because IaaS users could access and define the required data framework, computing framework

and network framework.

In a data framework, users could define structured data, unstructured data and semi-structured data.

Structured and semi-structured data could be defined via traditional databases, such as RDBMS and

OODBMS. In these models, structured data stored which has a schema before adding data to the

databases. All of data frameworks and in particular unstructured data could be defined by cloud databases,

such as Hadoop which is based on MapReduce programming model. MapReduce programming language

technique allows storing data on a cluster of resources. The implementation model of MapReduce is

provided by Hadoop which is provided a category of open-source database, applications and analytics

tools.

In computing framework, users have full-permission for developing, installing and running new

application for computing purposes. Each application could reserve a cluster of CPUs and RAMs.

Several tools and databases with analysis tools emerge to provide computing framework on big data. For

example, Hive is an open-access “SQL-like” BI tools that allows BI applications to run query on Hadoop

data. Other example, Pig is another open-source platform that allows analyzing on big data by a “Perl-

language-like” feature.

In network framework, users have a significant benefit, because they have access to required network

control, such as network cards and the Internet connectivity. For example they could access to regular

network transfer infrastructure such as Optical Carrier (OC) 768 backbone [29], which is capable of

transferring 39,813.12 Mbit/s.

This accessibility to data, computing and network framework allows the users to control require

hardware like an administrator in IT department. However, these users could handle infrastructure without

worrying about maintenance.

4.2.2. The Role of Platform as a Service (PaaS)

M. Bahrami and M. Singhal

PaaS is a platform that provided by cloud vendor. The PaaS model does not require users to setup of

any software, programming language, environment application, designer, tools or application. Developers

use vendor’s platform, library and programming language for developing their applications. This model

provides a software application for outgrowth of the cloud applications delivery. PaaS allows developer to

focus on software application development, without worrying about operating system maintenance like in

IaaS. The PaaS provides services for software programmers to develop and deploy their applications with

an abstraction on the hardware layer.

The role of PaaS in handling big data is less than IaaS, because some restrictions and limitations are

applied to PaaS users in order to work on the data framework, computing framework and transfer

frameworks. In this service layer, users are limited to cloud vendor frameworks. For example, Google

App Engine provides a platform which supports Python, Java, PHP, Go and MySQL compatible Cloud

SQL to develop applications. So, in this service layer, users could not access other languages, such as C#

or C++ and server hardware. However, developers still could build, deploy and run their scalable

applications on the cloud computing systems. These applications could capture a massive amount of data

from anywhere and use a cluster of CPUs for computing and analytics of big data.

4.2.3. The Role of Software as a Service (SaaS)

The traditional model of software is to purchase software applications and install them on the local

computer. However, SaaS model provides applications in the cloud though a network and does not require

customers to install applications on their local computers.

According to Microsoft, SaaS model could be divided to the following categories (lower-level to

higher-level) [30]:

 Ad-hoc/Custom, which supports by minimum requirement to migrate traditional and client/server

application to this level. Ad-hoc/Custom models allow developer to build their application based

on ad-hoc or peer-to-peer technology;

 Configurability, which provides more flexibility through configuration metadata and supports

peer-to-peer technology;

 Multi-tenancy, which adds multi-tenancy to the configuration level, and a single instance of

application allows serving all the vendor’s consumers;

 and Scalability, which supports all other lower-levels. In addition, this level supports scalability

through architectural design that adds a capability of dynamic load-balancing for growing or

shrinking cloud servers. Most applications in the cloud are developed at this level.

The impact of SaaS is less than PaaS, because in this service layer, users could use provided

applications and resources. This service layer is limited to developers. However, users still could work on

Role of Cloud Computing Architectures in Big Data

big data that could be added before or captured by provided infrastructure. For example, Google Apps,

such as Gmail, provides services on the web and users could not add or manipulate capturing data from

server. Users are limited to web-based interface for email processes such as sending an email.

4.2.4. The Role of Business Intelligence (BI)

The BIaaS layer sits on the top of cloud architecture service layers and aims to provide the required

analytic models for cloud customers.

Information granularity as Pedrycz defined [31] is a structure which plays a key role in human

cognitive and decision-making computing. The BI service layer could provide a platform for information

granularity on the cloud computing and in particular granular computing, which is a processing of

complex information entities. Unlike the traditional computing, cloud computing by granular computing

on big data may provide a significant result. For example, Bessis at al. [32] propose a big picture by

collecting big data and using cloud computing for managing disasters.

Cloud computing could provide the following information granularity and granular computing

infrastructures [31]:

 A granular description of data and pattern classification by non-SQL databases, such as

SciDB[33];

 A representation of information granules by migrating traditional applications to the cloud;

 Different granular architecture and development by collecting information from different

sources and computing with high quality rather than traditional models which were working

with a limited computing resource;

 Collaborative and linguistic models of decision-making by collecting information from

different sources at the cloud storages.

The information-processing level [34], which is encountering a number of conceptual and algorithmic

layers indexed by the size of information granular, could be high if a cloud application provides a

computing model. However, if a cloud application provides only a storage model, this impact and

granular computing will be low. For example, when an application provides a service for collecting data

from financial consumers and running an analytical model on this data to make a decision about

investment, cost and profit, this application has a high-level BIaaS impact. For instance, Xu et al. [35]

present “Big Cloud based Parallel Data miner (BC-PDM)” which is a framework for integrating data

mining applications on MapReduce and HDFS (Hadoop File System) platforms.

Cloud based BI could reduce the total development cost, because cloud computing systems provide

environment for agile development and reduce the maintenance cost. Also, the BI could not be

M. Bahrami and M. Singhal

implemented on a traditional system, because the current volume of data for analysis is massive. BI-as-a-

Service [36] is other example that shows how the BI could migrate to the cloud computing systems as a

software application in the SaaS layer.

One of the major challenges with traditional computing is analysis of big data. Cloud computing at

BIaaS layer could handle this issue by employing a cluster of computing resources. For example,

SciDB[33] is an open-source and cloud-based database management system (NOSQL DBMS) for

scientific application with several functions for analyzing of big data, such as astronomy, remote sensing

and climate modeling.

4.2.5. Other Service Layers

The major service models of cloud computing are BIaaS, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. As shown in Table 1,

we assigned each service to the major service models.

Table 1. Other service layers in Cloud Architecture

Service name Related to

Service Description and Offers Role of Service in

Big Data

Business-Process-as-a-

Service (BPaaS) [37]

BIaaS Automated tool support Analysis of big data

Business-Intelligence-as-a-

Service (BIaaS) [38]

BIaaS Integrated approaches to management support Analysis of big data

Simulation Software-as-a-

Service (SimSaaS) [39]

SaaS Simulation service with a MTA configuration

model

Analysis of big data

Testing-as-a-Service (TaaS)

[40]

SaaS Software testing environments Test big data tools

Robot-as-a-Service

(RaaS)[41]

PaaS Service-oriented robotics computing Action on big data

Privacy-as-a-Service (PaaS)

[42]

PaaS A framework for privacy preserving data sharing

with a view of practical application

Big data privacy

IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) [43] IaaS Outsource IT department’s resource (on Grid

infrastructure that time)

Maintaining of big

data

Hardware-as- a Service

(HaaS) [44]

IaaS A transparent integration of remote hardware that is

distributed over multiple geographical locations

into an operating system.

Capturing and

maintaining of big

data

Database-as-a-Service

(DBaaS) [45]

IaaS (1) a workload-aware approach to multi-tenancy

(2) a graph-based data partitioning algorithm

(3) an adjustable security scheme

Storing big data

Data-as-a-Service (Daas)

[46]

IaaS Analyzing major concerns for data as a service Storing big data

Big-Data-as-a-Service [47] All

layers

Service-generate for big data Generate big data

4.2.6. Big Data Tools

The Table 2 shows some big data open-source tools which are provided through cloud computing

Role of Cloud Computing Architectures in Big Data

infrastructures. Most of the tools are provided by Apache 1 and released under the Apache License. We

categorized each tool based on those applications of big data.

Table 2. Big Data Tools

Big Data Tools Description 2

Data Analysis Tools

Ambari 3 A web-based tool for provisioning, managing, and monitoring Apache Hadoop clusters.

Avro 4 A data serialization system.

Chukwa 5 A data collection system for managing large distributed systems.

Hive 6 A data warehouse infrastructure that provides data summarization and ad hoc querying.

Pig 7 A high-level data-flow language and execution framework for parallel computation.

Spark 8 A fast and general compute engine for Hadoop data. Spark provides a simple and expressive

programming model that supports a wide range of applications, including ETL, machine

learning, stream processing, and graph computation.

ZooKeeper 9 A high-performance coordination service for distributed applications

Actian 10

An Analytics Platform which accelerates the analytics value chain from connecting to massive amounts of raw big data all the way to delivering actionable business value.

HPCC 11

Provide high-performance, data-parallel processing for applications utilizing big data.

Data Mining Tools

Orange 12

A data visualization and analysis for novice and experts.

Mahout 13

A scalable machine learning and data mining library.

KEEL 14

An assess-evolutionary algorithm for data mining problems.

Social Network Tools

Apache Kafka A unified, high-throughput, low-latency platform for handling real-time data feeds.

BI Tools

Talend 15

A data integration, data management, enterprise application integration and big data software tools and services.

Jedox 16

An analyzing, reporting and planning functions.

Pentaho 17

A data integration, business analytics, data visualization and predictive analytics.

rasdaman 18

A multi-dimensional raster data (arrays) of unlimited size through an SQL-style query language.

1 http://apache.org/

2 The description retrieved from each tools official website and Wikipedia at http://wikipedia.org

3 http://ambari.apache.org/

4 http://avro.apache.org/

5 http://incubator.apache.org/chukwa/

6 http://hive.apache.org/

7 http://pig.apache.org/

8 http://spark.incubator.apache.org/

9 http://zookeeper.apache.org/

10 http://www.actian.com/about-us/#overview

11 http://hpccsystems.com/

12 http://orange.biolab.si/

13 http://mahout.apache.org/

14 http://keel.es/

15 http://www.talend.com/

16 http://www.jedox.com/en/

17 http://www.pentaho.com/

18 http://rasdaman.eecs.jacobs-university.de/

M. Bahrami and M. Singhal

Search Tools

Apache

Lucene 1

An application for full text indexing and searching capabilities.

Apache Solr 2 A full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, near real-time indexing, dynamic clustering,

database integration, rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling, and geospatial search.

Elasticsearch 3

A distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with a RESTful web interface and

schema-free JSON documents.

MarkLogic 4 A NOSQL and XML database.

mongoDB 5 A cross-platform document-oriented database system, JSON-like documents with dynamic

schemas.

Cassandra 6 A scalable multi-master database with no single point of failure.

HBase 7 A scalable, distributed database that supports structured data storage for large tables.

InfiniteGraph 8 A distributed graph database.

4.3. Implementation Models of Cloud Computing Systems

A Cloud computing system based on infrastructure location could be implemented as Private, Public

or Hybrid cloud.

The private model is a local implementation of cloud computing system. In this model, hardware is

located in local data centers and uses cloud software applications to provide service to local users. This

model is the best option for consumers who needs cloud computing capabilities with low-risk in IT

departments because this model allows an IT department to migrate from the traditional model to the

cloud computing system and does not require data to be migrated to another location (such as cloud

vendor location). This model is implemented for local trusted users. This model still allows scalability,

on-demanded self-service, and elastic service. However, this model requires high investment in

maintenance, recovery, disaster control, security control, and monitoring.

In addition, the private cloud computing model enables an IT department to handle a local

organization’s big data by its own infrastructure, such as the storage of big data and computing big data.

This model provides a flexible resource assignment and could enhance the resource availability.

Several open source applications have been developed for establishing private cloud computing based

on IaaS and SaaS service layers. For example, CloudIA is a private cloud computing system at (HFU)

[48]. The targeted users of the CloudIA project are HFU staff and students running e-Learning

1 http://lucene.apache.org/

2 http://lucene.apache.org/solr/

3 http://www.elasticsearch.org/

4 http://developer.marklogic.com/

5 http://www.mongodb.org/

6 http://cassandra.apache.org/

7 http://hbase.apache.org/

8 http://www.objectivity.com/

Role of Cloud Computing Architectures in Big Data

applications, and external people for collaboration purposes.

The public model is a regular model of cloud computing system. This model is provided by cloud

vendor who supports billing and a subscription system for public users. This model, unlike a private

model, does not require high investment, because consumers could pay on pay-per-use basis for cloud

storage or cloud computing services on demand.

The hybrid model composes private and public clouds. This model could connect a private cloud to

public cloud through network connection, such as the Internet.

This model has several advantages, which are listed below:

 Collaboration between cloud computing systems: Often collaboration between two clouds led to

emergence of hybrid cloud model. An organization could keep their own cloud security and maintenance,

and simultaneously have collaboration with other clouds. This collaboration could be permanent or

temporary.

 Scalability: This model also is useful for extending the scalability of a private cloud computing

system, because in case of limited resources at a peak time, a cluster of new resources could be added

temporary from another cloud.

5 Cloud Computing Issues

The cloud computing technology is the best option for dealing with big data. However, cloud

computing is still nascent state and we still needed to address some major issues. In this section, we

review the major cloud computing issues which are shown in Figure 2 and are based on an IDC Survey in

2009 [49].

When big data costs customers, and a system disaster could cause organizational destruction in the

digital age, migration applications and databases from traditional model are difficult to cloud, because:

 migration to the cloud computing system is difficult; Migration requires to redevelop

applications, data and sometimes requires to use efficient programming models to save resources

as well as resource costs;

 returning data to the IT department is difficult;

 connection is via an unsecured network, such as the Internet;

 cloud vendor administrator users could have an access to users data;

 data warehouse location is transparent to consumers ;

 We do not have a cloud computing standard and standard cloud architecture. It causes some big

M. Bahrami and M. Singhal

issues, such as different architectures, difficulty with migration data and application to another

cloud vendors;

 We do not have any customization in cloud computing systems;

 We do not have a strong Service Layer Agreement (SLA) for customer satisfaction.

Cloud customers need to have a contract with one or more cloud vendor(s) -often one cloud vendor-

and they should use the provided operating systems, middlewares, APIs and/or interfaces. Data and

application are dependent on the platforms or are provided by cloud vendor infrastructure. This

dependency in cloud services has several issues. For example, in Figure 2, “Security” is the major concern

in cloud computing systems. Cloud features, such as a shared resource pool and multi-user/tenancy cause

security issue because the resourced pool are shared through users and we could expose users’ data and

users’ privacy to others.

Unsecured connection to the vendor, network access security, Internet access security and cloud

vendors’ user security emerged as other major security concerns based on accessibility to the cloud via the

Internet.

Figure 2. Major Cloud Computing Concerns [49]

“Bringing back in-house may be difficult” with 79.8% issue rate and “Hard to integrate with in-house

IT” with 76.8% issue rate indicates customers are afraid of data and software application migration to the

cloud computing systems, because the migration is difficult to integrate with IT departments and it is

difficult to return data back to the IT department; “Lack of interoperability standards” with 80.2% is

Role of Cloud Computing Architectures in Big Data

another cloud issue. This issue shows that cloud computing requires higher interoperability with other

cloud computing systems; also as indicated in this report, “Not enough ability to customize” with a 76.0%

issue rates show, the cloud computing system requires dynamic architecture and customization.

Some studies, such as [50] show existing cloud computing systems (Amazon EC2 in this case) could

not be responsible with a cost-effective performance for HPC applications over using tightly-couple

hardware such as Grid Computing or Parallel Computing systems.

To overcome these issues, some study such as [51, 21] are proposed which introduce “Cloud Template

architecture”. Especially when we employ the cloud computing system for dealing with big data, this

architecture is useful. In this study, we show each template could be organized for each purpose and a

template could support several service layers simultaneously.

6 Chapter Summary

In this chapter, we discussed a definition of big data, the importance of big data, and major big data

challenges and issues. We understand that, if we analyze big data with business intelligence tools, we may

provide a catalyst to change an organization to a smart organization. We discussed the importance of

cloud computing technology as a solution to handle big data for both computing and storage. We

reviewed the capabilities of cloud computing systems that are important for big data, such as resource

scalability, resource shrink-ability, resource pool sharing, on-demanded servicing, elastic servicing, and

collaboration with other cloud computing systems. We explained cloud architecture service layers and

role of each service layer to handle big data. We discussed how business intelligence could change big

data to smaller valuable data by using cloud computing services and tools. Finally, we discussed major

cloud computing system issues that need to be addressed for cloud computing to become a viable solution

for handling big data.

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