Big data and analytics go hand in hand. If you are handling big data, then you understand the power and the pitfalls this brings. Advanced analytic options, AI and real-time processing are useful tools. But to balance this power you may end up sacrificing productivity and ease of use. Azure Databricks provides a high-performance analytics engine optimized for your Azure cloud database. It’s incredibly easy to deploy, even for large-scale enterprises. Free up your team for the more important stuff.
What is Databricks
Azure Databricks is a collaboration between Microsoft and Databricks to provide an optimized analytics platform for a large-scale cloud environment. So, what does it do? First, let’s look at Databricks.
Basically, Databricks is Apache Spark made more accessible to a large-scale enterprise environment. If you aren’t familiar with Apache Spark, it is the open-source analytics engine developed out of UC Berkeley that has gained significant traction in the past 5 years. It has become a leading platform with widespread use at the enterprise level. It has some drawbacks, though. It is complicated to deploy, and the larger your organization, the more complicated it becomes. Enter Databricks. This managed version automates a lot of the processes, making deployment much easier for large-scale environments. With Databricks, you get optimized performance, automatic scaling, and tools to increase ease of monitoring and security.
Databricks on Azure
Microsoft recognized this opportunity to provide an end-to-end platform with Azure’s leading network and storage and Databricks’ analytic power. As a leader in the cloud enterprise market, Azure is expanding its portfolio to support larger enterprise clients. Azure Databricks lets clients easily build large scale data pipelines and machine learning models.
This unique offering provides several benefits not found in the standalone platform.
- It’s Easy – Microsoft came into this project with 3 main goals, the first of which is increasing your team’s productivity. To that end, they have simplified the process from start to finish. The package comes with interactive notebooks that help you get started with Spark and provide an environment to run analytics and monitor your jobs. They increase collaboration in your team by allowing you to share code among users. As a native Azure platform there is no additional setup. Management is taken care of through your central Azure control center.
- It’s Fast – According to Microsoft this version is faster than standalone Spark. Current customers have reported an incredible increase in processing power and productivity. Sunil Bondalapti, Director of Information Technology, Lennox International was quoted in a Microsoft blog on March 22. “At Lennox International, we have 1000’s of devices streaming data back into our IoT environment…Using Azure Databricks has opened the flood gates to all kinds of new use cases and innovations. In our previous process, 15 devices, which created 2 million records, took 6 hours to process. With Azure Databricks, we are able to process 25,000 devices – 10 billion records – in under 14 minutes.”
- It’s cost effective – The platform automatically scales and terminates as needed. The high-speed processing power with automated scaling significantly decreases runtime. This opens up your database and team to other applications.
- It’s secure – Azure Databricks boasts the same security and compliance protocols as other Azure products. This includes appropriate SLAs, simplified security processes, and role-based access controls.
- End-to End – Azure Databricks is designed from the ground up to work within the Azure framework. This means it can seamlessly integrate with other Azure products. You can utilize any data storage platform in your account. This includes IoT, Blob Storage, SQL Data Warehouse, Event Hubs, HDInsight Kafka Clusters, Data Lake Store, and Cosmos DB.
If you handle big data, we think Azure Databricks is a great platform that could significantly increase your productivity and machine learning capabilities. To learn more about Azure Databricks and how Dobler Consulting can help with your data analytics visit www.doblerconsulting.com or call us at +1 (813) 322-3240 (US) /+1 (416) 646-0651 (Canada).
Sources:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/a-technical-overview-of-azure-databricks/