Monthly Meeting

Tonight, Alex Woolford, Solutions Engineer from Hortonworks, will be talking about Apache Nifi: an easy to use, powerful, and reliable system to process and distribute data. Not only is Nifi secure (it was developed by the NSA), it's also lightweight enough to run on a Raspberry Pi!

The actionable insights from data has become an increasingly important source of competitive advantage for virtually every business. There’s also a trend towards decentralized IT as technology selections are more frequently driven by line-of-business. This has contributed to fragmentation: data has become scattered across various cloud services as well as in on-premise data centers.

In order to extract the greatest value from our data assets, it’s necessary to combine data from these silos in a timely manner. Some of these opportunities are fleeting (e.g. it’s not helpful when your GPS tells you that you should’ve gotten off at the previous exit).

Back in 2008, the NSA started working on a “data in motion” solution. In 2014, they contributed their solution, Apache Nifi, to the Apache Software Foundation. This open-source technology allows users to create scalable data-flows via a web-based user interface and dramatically simplifies the tricky parts (e.g. monitoring, how to trade-off between latency and throughput, prioritization, security).

Apache Nifi has empowered analysts to do things that, previously, could only be done by rockstar developers. Businesses benefit by leveraging their perishable insights: ensuring that the right information is in the right place at the right time. There are currently 155 ‘processors’ (… and counting) to connect to sources (e.g. Kafka, S3, relational databases, HDFS, Solr, Kafka, etc…) and manipulate streams of data.

Alex been working in advanced business analytics for about 11 years, and analytics at scale (i.e. Hadoop and related technologies) for the past 5 years. He holds a masters degree in supply chain from Cranfield University in the UK and, in his own words, is "fairly promiscuous with technology".

Agenda:
6:30pm - 7:00pm Welcome & Introductions
7:00pm - 8:00pm Alex Woolford & Nifi
8:00pm - 8:30pm Social Time

Thank you to Alex Woolford for speaking tonight and sponsoring the pizza & beer!!