Selecting from your technology choices
There are many technology options that you can choose from for the previously mentioned activity layers. These choices are increasing every day as more solution providers and technology vendors enter the fray, and more development work happens that gets shared in the open source world. In case you have a small initiative with a limited budget or are just starting off and all these different choices are confusing, please do not worry; as long as you have the right data scientist and application developer (more about these profiles in the next chapter) in your team, they will be able to do most, if not all, of the activities using freely available programming languages and software. Many successful Big Data projects started and continued this way for a long time.
An overview of key Big Data technology components
Before we get into the choices available for the specific layers, let's introduce you to a few of these in broad terms of what they are. You will...