Exploring Big Data: Course 7 – Implementing Real-Time Analytics with Azure HDInsight

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Big Data with Sam Lester

(This is course #7 of my review of the Microsoft Professional Program in Big Data)

Course #7 of 10 – Implementing Real-Time Analytics with Azure HDInsight

Overview: The “Implementing Real-Time Analytics with Azure HDInsight” course is comprised of three graded sections of videos and labs, teaching the high-level concepts of HBase, Storm, and Spark. There is an additional section of videos on Kafka, but the content is not included in the quizzes and final exam.

Time Spent / Level of Effort: As I do with each Edx course, I opened the homework quiz and the final exam in new windows to be able to watch for the content as it appeared in the videos. After going through the videos for the first main section on HBase, I was able to successfully answer the homework and exam questions for the HBase section. I decided to continue with all the videos and completed the course (graded sections) entirely by only watching the videos in roughly 3 hours. After finishing the graded sections, I then went back and spent about 2.5 hours working through the labs. I finished the videos and exams in a single night and the labs the following night.

Course Highlight: This was the first time I’ve spent time exploring the concept of processing streaming data. I feel like I have a lot better understanding of handling unending streams of data, such as with IoT sensors or social media activity, by defining streaming temporal windows and determining aspects such as retry logic. Spouts and Bolts  Storm Acker Sam Lester

Suggestions: The videos alone were sufficient to easily pass the course with the needed 70%. I watched them all at double speed with the quizzes and exam open in other tabs to watch for the test content. I then went back to complete the labs but having the graded part of the course out of the way was nice to be able to explore the labs on my own as opposed to sticking with the documentation steps.

If you have taken this course in the past or are going through it now, please leave a comment and share your experience.

Thanks,
Sam Lester (MSFT)