News

MapR Boosts Big Data Streaming in Open Source Ecosystem Pack

• By David Ramel
• December 1, 2016

New Big Data streaming capabilities were highlighted by MapR Technologies Inc. in its new Ecosystem Pack, which helps developers keep current with all of the fast-changing open source components of the company's Converged Data Platform.

The MapR Ecosystem Pack (MEP) is a program used by developers to independently upgrade various parts of their open source ecosystem stack. With quarterly updates, it helps developers keep up with popular projects such as Apache Spark and Apache Drill that are continually upgraded.

MEP 2.0 provides flexible access and new capabilities for streaming applications, among other improvements.

The streaming capabilities come with new support for the Apache Kafka project, specifically the Kafka REST API and Kafka Connect. Kafka is a distributed streaming platform that works with the company's MapR Streams, a global publish-subscribe event streaming system for Big Data analytics.

"The Kafka REST Proxy for MapR Streams lets customers use any development language in any environment that supports HTTP to work with streaming data," the company said in a statement yesterday. "Kafka Connect for MapR Streams delivers a framework for standardized access between MapR Streams and the most popular data sources and targets. These capabilities further enable customers to build IoT-scale, global systems of record with MapR Streams by allowing embedded devices like microcontrollers to produce and consume data in real time using REST, while integrating data with other systems like RDBMSs and search engines."

Other enhancements include support for Spark 2.0.1, which was released Oct. 3. That version of Spark helps programs run faster and provides quicker analytics results via whole stage code generation and in-memory columnar functionality that stores optimized data in RAM.

Also upgraded was Apache Drill, a schema-free SQL query engine for Hadoop, NoSQL and cloud storage.

Finally, the company said, "MapR Installer Stanzas enable API-driven installation of MapR clusters on-premises or in the cloud. Part of the Spyglass Initiative, this feature helps users build a Stanza, which is a configuration file that describes a cluster and executes it programmatically to automate new deployments. This is especially useful for quickly deploying elastic clusters across the cloud."

MEP 2.0 will become available this month.