Towards building an analytics platform in the cloud

Abstract

Recently enterprises have been able to leverage two revolutionary new tools for gaining a competitive advantage for their business -- cloud computing and analytic applications. Cloud computing unburdens them from running and maintaining their compute resources, whereas analytic applications comb through their big data to provide new insights for a competitive advantage in the market. Analytic applications are carefully tailored to their target problems. While there is a lot of work published on both the mechanics of cloud computing as well as analytic methods for distilling insights from a variety of data, there is little work available about the cloud influence on the analytics platforms which aim at lowering the barrier for the creation, deployment, scaling and maintenance of next generation analytic workloads. This paper discusses the challenges we are facing today in order to provide an analytics platform to reduce cost and increase performance of analytics applications in the cloud computing environment.