I attended the Boston Big Data Summit last week, which was extremely well attended and an excellent session. Moderated by Fred Holahan (who announced his new position as VP, Marketing at VoltDB, congrats!), the panel discussion included folks from 10gen (the “MongoDB guys”), Cloudera (the “Hadoop guys”), Infobright and VoltDB. (As an aside, it seems that Cloudera has done a great job branding their company around Hadoop, but 10gen seems to want to sit behind the Mongo brand?)
Anyway, the topic was real world problems that each of the vendors solutions can address. Each vendor got 10 minutes to talk about a use case that was relevant to their solution. Without going into the details of each use case, what struck me was how similar the excitement of this space is to what happened in the mid-90′s with Java Application Servers.
Questions from the audience focused on scalability and “hardening” of each solution – as well as limitations of each solution as it pertained to certain use cases. Each of the vendors tried to defer to the others with regard to specific use cases for specific products – I’m not sure how long that will last, as there is significant overlap of the solutions – while each one does focus on a specific area, it will be impossible for them not to explore expansion into other capabilities.
There was also a discussion regarding management/monitoring of applications written with these tools. Both Cloudera and VoltDB mentioned that they are releasing management functionality in the next releases of their respective products – this is a good sign, as no serious development shop is going to put applications in production without basic management, so it indicates that these vendors are getting these types of questions from their community. There was also an excellent comment from the audience regarding DevOps – that their operations team has a detailed checklist that development is required to fill out before their applications can be put in production – and part of the checklist is to identify what tools are needed to manage and monitor the application, and how those tools can interoperate with the “standards” already in place. This had personal resonance to what we are seeing at Evident – where it is the developers and architects who are the initial users of ClearStone, and they then recommend production use of our tool to Operations once the applications are ready to go live. It also confirmed our belief that we need to continue to make ClearStone easier and useful for developers during their build/deploy process.
Overall the session was excellent – given that it was my first Big Data summit so I didn’t know the “rules”, I will recommend they publish the following guidelines (assuming they are all standard):
- Dinner is served and it’s really good, so don’t snack before hand
- Networking is primarily done before the event, and it ends later than stated, so if you have someplace else to be, get there a little early
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