Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / William Hsu / The Lambda Architecture is the new paradigm for big data, that helps in data processing with a balance on throughput, latency and fault-tolerance. There exists no single tool that provides a complete solution in terms of better accuracy, low latency and high throughput. This initiated the idea to use a set of tools and techniques to build a complete big data system. The Lambda Architecture defines a set of layers to fit in a set of tools and techniques rightly for building a complete big data system: Speed Layer, Serving Layer, Batch Layer. Each layer satisfies a set of properties and builds upon the functionality provided by the layers beneath it. The Batch layer is the place where the master dataset is stored, which is an immutable and append-only set of raw data. Also, batch layer pre-computes results using a distributed processing system like Hadoop, Apache Spark that can handle large quantities of data. The Speed Layer captures new data coming in real time and processes it. The Serving Layer contains a parallel processing query engine, which takes results from both Batch and Speed layers and responds to queries in real time with low latency. Stack Overflow is a Question & Answer forum with a huge user community, millions of posts with a rapid growth over the years. This project demonstrates The Lambda Architecture by constructing a data pipeline, to add a new “Recommended Questions” section in Stack Overflow user profile and update the questions suggested in real time. Also, various statistics such as trending tags, user performance numbers such as UpVotes, DownVotes are shown in user dashboard by querying through batch processing layer.

Monitoring data-intensive scientific infrastructures in real-time such as jobs, data transfers, and hardware failures is vital for efficient operation. Due to the high volume and velocity of events that are produced, traditional methods are no longer optimal. Several techniques, as well as enabling architectures, are available to support the Big Data issue. In this respect, this thesis complements existing survey work by contributing an extensive literature review of both traditional and emerging Big Data architecture. Scalability, low-latency, fault-tolerance, and intelligence are key challenges of the traditional architecture. However, Big Data technologies and approaches have become increasingly popular for use cases that demand the use of scalable, data intensive processing (parallel), and fault-tolerance (data replication) and support for low-latency computations. In the context of a scalable data store and analytics platform for monitoring data-intensive scientific infrastructure, Lambda Architecture was adapted and evaluated on the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, which has been proven effective. This is especially true for computationally and data-intensive use cases. In this thesis, an efficient strategy for the collection and storage of large volumes of data for computation is presented. By moving the transformation logic out from the data pipeline and moving to analytics layers, it simplifies the architecture and overall process. Time utilised is reduced, untampered raw data are kept at storage level for fault-tolerance, and the required transformation can be done when needed. An optimised Lambda Architecture (OLA), which involved modelling an efficient way of joining batch layer and streaming layer with minimum code duplications in order to support scalability, low-latency, and fault-tolerance is presented. A few models were evaluated; pure streaming layer, pure batch layer and the combination of both batch and streaming layers. Experimental results demonstrate that OLA performed better than the traditional architecture as well the Lambda Architecture. The OLA was also enhanced by adding an intelligence layer for predicting data access pattern. The intelligence layer actively adapts and updates the model built by the batch layer, which eliminates the re-training time while providing a high level of accuracy using the Deep Learning technique. The fundamental contribution to knowledge is a scalable, low-latency, fault-tolerant, intelligent, and heterogeneous-based architecture for monitoring a data-intensive scientific infrastructure, that can benefit from Big Data, technologies and approaches.

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Master of Science / Department of Computer Science / William H. Hsu / Data is generated all the time over Internet, systems sensors and mobile devices around us this is often referred to as ‘big data’. Tapping this data is a challenge to organizations because of the nature of data i.e. velocity, volume and variety. What make handling this data a challenge? This is because traditional data platforms have been built around relational database management systems coupled with enterprise data warehouses. Legacy infrastructure is either technically incapable to scale to big data or financially infeasible. Now the question arises, how to build a system to handle the challenges of big data and cater needs of an organization? The answer is Lambda Architecture. Lambda Architecture (LA) is a generic term that is used for scalable and fault-tolerant data processing architecture that ensures real-time processing with low latency. LA provides a general strategy to knit together all necessary tools for building a data pipeline for real-time processing of big data. LA comprise of three layers – Batch Layer, responsible for bulk data processing, Speed Layer, responsible for real-time processing of data streams and Service Layer, responsible for serving queries from end users. This project draw analogy between modern data platforms and traditional supply chain management to lay down principles for building a big data platform and show how major challenges with building a data platforms can be mitigated. This project constructs an end to end data pipeline for ingestion, organization, and processing of data and demonstrates how any organization can build a low cost distributed data platform using Lambda Architecture.

Thesis (MTech (Information Technology))--Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2019 / The proliferation of data from sources like social media, and sensor devices has become overwhelming for traditional data storage and analysis technologies to handle. This has prompted a radical improvement in data management techniques, tools and technologies to meet the increasing demand for effective collection, storage and curation of large data set. Most of the technologies are open-source. Big data is usually described as very large dataset. However, a major feature of big data is its velocity. Data flow in as continuous stream and require to be actioned in real-time to enable meaningful, relevant value. Although there is an explosion of technologies to handle big data, they are usually targeted at processing large dataset (historic) and real-time big data independently. Thus, the need for a unified framework to handle high volume dataset and real-time big data. This resulted in the development of models such as the Lambda architecture. Effective decision-making requires processing of historic data as well as real-time data. Some decision-making involves complex processes, depending on the likelihood of events. To handle uncertainty, probabilistic systems were designed. Probabilistic systems use probabilistic models developed with probability theories such as hidden Markov models with inference algorithms to process data and produce probabilistic scores. However, development of these models requires extensive knowledge of statistics and machine learning, making it an uphill task to model real-life circumstances. A new research area called probabilistic programming has been introduced to alleviate this bottleneck. This research proposes the combination of modern open-source big data technologies with probabilistic programming and Lambda architecture on easy-to-get hardware to develop a highly fault-tolerant, and scalable processing tool to process both historic and real-time big data in real-time; a common solution. This system will empower decision makers with the capacity to make better informed resolutions especially in the face of uncertainty. The outcome of this research will be a technology product, built and assessed using experimental evaluation methods. This research will utilize the Design Science Research (DSR) methodology as it describes guidelines for the effective and rigorous construction and evaluation of an artefact. Probabilistic programming in the big data domain is still at its infancy, however, the developed artefact demonstrated an important potential of probabilistic programming combined with Lambda architecture in the processing of big data.

With the advent of cloud computing, resizable scalable infrastructures for data processing is now available to everyone. Software platforms and frameworks that support data intensive distributed applications such as Amazon Web Services and Apache Hadoop enable users to the necessary tools and infrastructure to work with thousands of scalable computers and process terabytes of data. However writing scalable applications that are run on top of these distributed frameworks is still a demanding and challenging task. The thesis aimed to advance the core scientific and technological means of managing, analyzing, visualizing, and extracting useful information from large data sets, collectively known as “big data”. The term “big-data” in this thesis refers to large, diverse, complex, longitudinal and/or distributed data sets generated from instruments, sensors, internet transactions, email, social networks, twitter streams, and/or all digital sources available today and in the future. We introduced architectures and concepts for implementing a cloud-based infrastructure for analyzing large volume of semi-structured and unstructured data. We built and evaluated an application prototype for collecting, organizing, processing, visualizing and analyzing data from the retail industry gathered from indoor navigation systems and social networks (Twitter, Facebook etc). Our finding was that developing large scale data analysis platform is often quite complex when there is an expectation that the processed data will grow continuously in future. The architecture varies depend on requirements. If we want to make a data warehouse and analyze the data afterwards (batch processing) the best choices will be Hadoop clusters and Pig or Hive. This architecture has been proven in Facebook and Yahoo for years. On the other hand, if the application involves real-time data analytics then the recommendation will be Hadoop clusters with Storm which has been successfully used in Twitter. After evaluating the developed prototype we introduced a new architecture which will be able to handle large scale batch and real-time data. We also proposed an upgrade of the existing prototype to handle real-time indoor navigation data.