Companies are acquiring massive amounts of data and also providing internet based service to millions of people. This is extremely challenging due to the large scale of data involved and the huge number of concurrent requests by users. In this subject we will study the current state-of-the-art technologies for analysing huge amounts of data and responding to millions of user requests within one second. Currently the most cost efficient way of achieving the above aim is to use large-scale cloud-based services offered by vendors such as Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, etc. We will study how to use the cloud services provided by Amazon Web Services to meet the big data needs of businesses. We will also teach how to program the world’s most popular Big Data analytics framework called Hadoop. In particular the Hadoop software systems that we will learn in detail include Map Reduce, Hive and Apache Spark. This subject will also teach the following topics: cloud architectures, parallel database systems, key value stores, transaction support in the cloud, virtualization, and multi-tenant database systems.
