B23 Data Platform: Enabling Data
February 12th, 2016
I’ve spent my career working on data problems and building data products. During this time, I’ve spent a lot more time fumbling with infrastructure and moving data than I’ve spent performing value-add data science or data analytics. I learned to live with those frustrations, and my customers learned to live with the amount of time it took to ask a question of a new dataset. As a result of these experiences, I’m very excited to introduce B23 Data Platform to people like me and stakeholders like mine.
In our previous post (Welcome to B23 Data Platform, the Next Big Thing in Big Data) we introduced several of the main concepts for the rationale of why we built B23 Data Platform. In this blog, I’ll show you you how we use them.
As a data scientist, I should not have to have to worry about arcane items like private subnets, bastion hosts, and internet gateways. However, somebody in my enterprise does worry about those things. With B23 Data Platform, I have the confidence that I’m protecting my resources without getting in the way of completing productive work. A Space embodies the set of secure infrastructure resources within your preferred cloud provider. These secure cloud resources will host your data pipeline(s). We use industry best practices to lock down these assets, and we create these assets in your cloud account. You have complete control and transparency over your resources and data.
To create a Space you simply login, choose your cloud provider, give the Space a name, and enter your credentials. A few minutes later, you have a running Space. It is that simple.
Steps to Create a Space
The big data and data science ecosystem has become very crowded with tools. Tools exists for a reason. Some are easy to differentiate, while the distinction between others is much more nuanced; this offers both challenges and opportunity. The challenge stems from the paradox of choice. However, the opportunity exists to build a data application that is tailored exactly to your business needs. We enable data scientists by giving them access to these different types of tools. We call these Stacks. Stacks are the platforms within which you will store and/or analyze your data. B23 Data Platform is a marketplace for you to run the data application that solves your data problems. Moreover, B23 offers you the opportunity to experiment with multiple platforms so that you can make informed business decisions about the Stacks best suited to your problem. Once again, we used cloud best practices like auto-scaling so that you can recover from failures. We tag every resource so that you can track these assets with third party governance and accounting tools.
We support a diverse set of Stacks today, and we are working on adding more all the time. One advantage of being a beta customer is helping us decide which Stacks to add next. With your space selected, you click which Stack to launch. You enter some basic information: a meaningful name for the stack, number of nodes, and the type of cloud instance. Click the launch button, and B23 Data Platform begins automatically provisioning and configuring the necessary components, securely and reliably. After a few minutes, your Stack will be up and running, ready for some data. Just a few clicks and keystrokes. Again, it is that simple.
Steps to Create a Stack
Now that you have one or more Stacks running, you have the tools at hand to perform analytics targeted to your data problem. However, these tools simply provide a canvas. You still need the data. For this B23 Data Platform provides EasyIngest, which is exactly what it sounds like. I’ll show you that in my next blog post.
Until then, please reach out to us to become part of our private beta program at https://platform.b23.io/.
By Mark Bittmann, Partner & Lead Data Scientist at B23, a Big Data and Cloud Computing Software Company bringing new age innovation to Big Data.
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