The husband and wife team at Effortless Insights recently hosted a workshop on two Apache Software Foundation (ASF) tools during a tech Meetup in Indian Harbour Beach, Florida. Darren and Katrina Griffith explored the benefits of Cassandra (TM) and Mahout (TM) and said these tools are a just a sample of the many free Apache Group tools that can be helpful to the developer community.
This volunteer workshop series was started by global consultancy DFHeinz. CEO Daryl Heinz says he started the meetup to help enable technologists seeking to cut down the cost of data analysis and maximize storage opportunities using the ASF projects.
Katrina kicked off the evening with a presentation on Cassandra. She said Cassandra was developed by Facebook, when they needed a solution for a highly available, scalable and reliable data storage system for their initial messaging tool. In 2010, Facebook gave Cassandra to the open source community. Katrina added that while Facebook recently switched to HBase (TM) for its needs, Cassandra remains a vital for many major apps, such as Netflix, Hulu, Apple, Instagram and Spotify. For some of the large scale applications, Cassandra is also used in product catalogs, fraud detection and machine learning.
If you are looking for an open source tool that has constant uptime, quickly writes a lot of data and is scalable, Cassandra is a great. Katriana added that Cassandra was developed specifically for high availability, fault tolerance and eventual data consistency.
Archived livestream will be available Feb 15, 2018
Darren closed the evening with a presentation on Mahout. For those developers looking for a scalable performant for machine learning, Mahout is an Apache tool that helps with just that. He said Mahout has been used in common e-commerce scenarios to increase accuracy and conversions.
Darren launched his session with a series of questions for the audience…
Has a problem already been solved by other machine learning tools?
Is this problem uniquely qualified to needing a more robust tool, such as Mahout?
Darren said it’s important to think about these questions because using Mahout can require an intensive onboarding with highly skilled minds and pricey equipment supported by a OpenCL driver. Darren encouraged the audience to look into the true need of the tool before choosing Mahout.
Inspired by a New York Times article talking about the recent Super Bowl, great question that was brought up during Darren’s Q&A session was predictive analytics vs. machine learning. Yes, there is a difference. And people often do intertwine the two buzz words. Going back to Darren’s series of questions, know what your problem is and what existing tools may help solve the issue.
To learn more about upcoming live workshops, visit DFHeinz.com. The global consultancy offers consulting services benefitting Fortune 500 companies across the United States. Email info@dfheinz.com for more information.
Keep your finger on the pulse of all things technology and culture on the Space Coast. Sign up for our email list today.