AI and Analytics in Production

Chapter 2. Successful Habits for Production

Success in production starts long before an application is deployed to a production setting. The key is having a system with the simplicity and flexibility to support a wide range of applications using a wide variety of data types and sources reliably and affordably at scale. In short, when you’re ready for production, the system is ready for you.

No doubt doing all this at scale is challenging, but it’s doable, it’s worth it and you can get there from where you are. We’re not talking about having a separate, isolated big data project but, instead, a centralized design and big data system that is core to your business. We also are not promoting the opposite extreme: to entirely do away with traditional solutions such as Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) and legacy code and applications. When done correctly, big data systems can work together with traditional solutions. The flexibility and agility possible in modern technologies make it appropriate for the big data system to be the backbone of your enterprise. These qualities of flexibility and agility also make it easier to make the transition to using big data approaches in your mainstream organization.

To plan and build such a system for your business, it can help to see what others have done that led them to success. In our “day jobs” we work with a lot of people who have done this and have overcome the difficulties. Almost all of the customers we deal with at MapR Technologies—more ...