Short Introduction to Cloud Computing, Big Data and Internet of Things
Nowadays it's quite hard not to come across one or more of these terms. I thought some of you may require a rough introduction to these technologies and wrote this post. There are also other related topics like virtualization, artificial intelligence, etc. But I don't want to make this post more complicated, because it already is. So, let's start our short journey.
Cloud Computing
As an analogy, we can say that cloud computing is like the electricity we are using. The business model is fairly similar. The electricity we use comes from central power sources, we don't own it ourselves. With the help of automatic metering systems we pay as we use it. We can instantly start using and again stop it easily. Computers (we call big ones as 'servers') also have resources: processing and storage. Storage keeps our data and processor gives us some output by processing the data. Cloud computing brings the electricity business model to computer world. With cloud computing, we can use the processing and storage resources of cloud computing providers. We simply select the servers we need, upload our data, process it and when we're finished with the service, we can simply end our service. It's that simple! Simply said, cloud computing is using computer power as a utility, just like electricity.
Let's say you want to accomplish a task that requires computers (or servers). The task is so intensive that may take days on a single computer, so you decide to have multiple computers and link them together to work as a whole. Even if you need these computers only once a month, you need to maintain them, provide a reasonable level of security, etc. If you use a cloud computing service for the same task, the only thing you would need is to get an account from a cloud provider (very similar to opening a gmail account). The infrastructure is now yours for a specified time-period. After you're done with the servers, you can easily pause or end your service with a few clicks. You just owed a small amount of money to the cloud provider. You don't have the hassle of maintaining all those computers. You can also have thousands of computers at the same time, acting like a single, huge computing resource. You can also easily increase/decrease your computing capacity. All is as simple as clicking a few buttons.
Big Data
Big data is a concept of making use of (usually) large amounts of data. Most of us don't aware, but data has an economic value. Benefiting from data is obviously not a new concept. But with the help of complex infrastructures like cloud computing and technology mobility, we entered a whole new era of information processing. Every device is producing a constant flow of data and we started to realize the economic value of previously unused data. There are theoretically countless examples to this, and one obvious example is internet searches. Search engines like Google uses searches to categorize people, so that they can show related ads and increase advertisement revenue. Google also managed to accurately predict spreading of flu virus in USA by using search trends. Later it was figured out that the search results were not accurate enough to have an economic value, but it's still a good example of how big data can be used in extraordinary ways.
Big data is not simply high volumes of data. Data is called "big data" if it has 3Vs: Velocity, Volume and Variety. This is a concept called 3V's of big data, as first introduced by Gartner in 2001 and has later became a norm in this field. Some sources add a fourth one: Veracity (uncertainty). Velocity is about fast information creation and transmission. Variety means a wide variety of data types and sources, which needs to be normalized, combined and integrated automatically. Finally, volume. There are many interesting statistics about big data: 90% of the whole information is created in the last 2 years. In just one minute, 204 emails are sent. To get a better idea about the information size, you can google "what happens in an internet minute" (I've also put a link to it below this post).
Internet of Things
Now we roughly know what big data is. But what is the source of all these data? Internet of things is the answer. Internet of things is the complex web of devices, which are (ideally) connected to each other, and also to internet. Most of the devices have embedded sensors. Each of these devices produces or collects data from their environment. The data can be a user input, a video record or various data collected from sensors. Internet of things is everywhere, but it has seen greater interest in healthcare and home automation. A patient is given a wearable device, which collects health related data from the patient and sends it to a central location for real-time analysis. Extreme versions of these devices are directly embedded inside the wrist of the patient. Home automation systems are good examples of internet of things. Since there are many different types of devices and connecting them introduces increased value for the home. Refrigerator can inform you that you ran out of milk, or it can suggest you new recipes that you can cook with the vegetables you have. Your garage door can know that it's your car coming, it can open itself and at the same time it can inform your heater so that it warms the room up a little bit. These all are just the tip of the iceberg kind of examples.
The Relationship Between These Technologies
Now you may have a rough idea about why these technologies and concepts are usually referred together. After the explanations above, you may have a big picture to match these technologies in your mind. Devices connected with the concept of internet of things produces data. This produced data is a typical example of big data. As the complexity and number of these devices increase, obviously big data solutions will be needed to overcome the processing burden of such amounts of data. Very large amounts of data also means a huge number of computers for processing, which usually will be much easier and cost efficient to process by using cloud computing.
In this post, I tried to roughly summarize cloud computing, big data and internet of things with examples, and give a general picture of how they are related to each other. I hope it has been useful to you. Now it's up to your comments to make this post better for everyone.
References
http://blogs.gartner.com/doug-laney/deja-vvvue-others-claiming-gartners-volume-velocity-variety-construct-for-big-data/
http://www.ibmbigdatahub.com/infographic/four-vs-big-data
https://www.google.org/flutrends/about/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2014/03/23/why-google-flu-is-a-failure/
http://www.dailyinfographic.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Internet-minute.jpg
http://www.slideshare.net/DeepikaSingh33/smart-sensor-technology-in-healthcare-protection
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_Things
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