Open Source IT for Delivering Big Data Analytics Systems as Services: A Selective Review

Advanced IT is used to develop and deliver big data analytics systems (BDAS) as services. In the last decade, proprietary and open source IT has been available for organizations interested in providing IT services classified as BDAS as a service (BDASaaS), as a platform (BDASaaP), or as an infrastructure (BDASaaI). For small and medium-size organizations – business and academic settings – the technological and economic barriers impede usually the implementation of proprietary IT, and, consequently, open source IT is preferred. Nevertheless, there is a vast variety of open source IT for BDAS services, and its adequate selection and integration is not straightforward. This chapter, thus, aims to report a descriptive review of the main open source IT for developing and delivering BDASaaS, BDASaaP, and BDASaaI capabilities from a high-level architectural perspective. This review is theoretically framed using a generic BDAS pipeline derived from the main BDAS literature and the new NIST Big Data Reference Architecture (NBDRA). Our descriptive review, thus, provides theoretical and practical insights for implementing BDAS services.