Summary

Welcome to a collection of labs that I have created, in the course of my own work, to facilitate the teaching and learning of various cloud-based platforms, services and frameworks in the field of Big Data, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence.

As much as possible, I have relied on Terraform to quickly spin up and experiment with the environments needed by the labs.

I hope you find it useful, and of course you are more than welcome to submit your contributions.

Here is a summary of the labs currently provided:

• Microsoft Azure:

  • Real-time data ingestion and processing with Microsoft Azure fully-managed services: hands-on lab, demonstrating the use of:

    • Event Hubs exposed as an Apache Kafka cluster, for ingestion of streaming data
    • Stream Analytics, for real-time processing of streaming data
    • SQL Data Warehouse, for the storage and analysis of big data volumes
    • Power BI, for business intelligence and data visualization

  • Serverless real-time data ingestion and processing with Microsoft Azure Event Hubs and Azure Functions: hands-on lab, demonstrating the use of:

    • Event Hubs exposed as an Apache Kafka cluster, for ingestion of streaming data and for storing batches of streaming to Blob storage
    • Functions, for serverless and scalable processing of streaming data

  • Graph processing with Azure Databricks and Cosmos DB: hands-on lab, demonstrating the use of:

    • Cosmos DB with Gremlin APIs, for storing and searching graphs
    • Azure Databricks, for graph analytics

  • Azure Databricks integration with Cosmos DB: hands-on lab, demonstrating the use of:

    • Integration of Azure Databricks and Cosmos DB via the Azure Cosmos DB Connector for Apache Spark
    • Reusability of the environment through Terraform

  • Use a cloud-based notebook server to get started with Azure Machine Learning, demonstrating how to:

    • Create a new cloud-based notebook server
    • Leverage the Azure Machine Learning service
    • Run automated machine learning experiments (AutoML).

  • Deploy and access Azure HDInsight in a private subnet, demonstrating how to:

    • Deploy an HDInsight cluster in a private subnet
    • Configure the netwok security groups (NSG) that are necessary to deny access from the public Internet through the public endpoint
    • Use an SSH tunnel with dynamic port forwarding to access the administrative web interfaces provided by the HDInsight cluster (eg. Ambari or the Spark UI)