This blogpost will give an introduction to the architecture and ideas behind TensorForce, a new reinforcement learning API built on top of TensorFlow. This post is about a practical question: How can the applied reinforcement learning community move from collections of scripts and individual examples closer to an API for reinforcement learning (RL) — a ‘tf-learn’ or ‘skikit-learn’ for RL? Before discussing ...

In the grassy Canterbury Plains of New Zealand, Craig Blackburn raises cattle and sheep in a line of work with a long tradition, in which he keeps a close eye on crops, land, weather and water. But Blackburn blends modern technology with his agricultural roots to manage the 990-acre Blackhills farm, a complex, bustling operation with 2,100 cattle and 800 sheep. The farm runs on irrigated water from the scen ...

I’m thrilled that we have hit an exciting milestone the Kafka community has long been waiting for: we have introduced exactly-once semantics in Apache Kafka in the 0.11 release. In this post, I’d like to tell you what exactly-once semantics mean in Apache Kafka, why it is a hard problem, and how the new idempotence and transactions features in Kafka enable correct exactly-once stream processing using Kafka’ ...

Baidu employs the PaddlePaddle framework internally for prediction systems, along with Python to make training models and deriving predictions a snap Many of the latest machine learning and data science tools purport to be easy to work with compared to previous generations of such frameworks and libraries. Chinese search engine giant Baidu now has an open source project in the same vein: a machine learning ...

Azure data lake store: a hyperscale distributed file service for big data analytics Douceur et al., SIGMOD’17 Today’s paper takes us inside Microsoft Azure’s distributed file service called the Azure Data Lake Store (ADLS). ADLS is the successor to an internal file system called Cosmos, and marries Cosmos semantics with HDFS, supporting both Cosmos and Hadoop workloads. Microsoft are in the process of migra ...

Data processing today is done in form of pipelines which include various steps like aggregation, sanitization, filtering and finally generating insights by applying various statistical models. Amazon Kinesis is a platform to build pipelines for streaming data at the scale of terabytes per hour. Parts of the Kinesis platform are a direct competitor to the Apache Kafka project for Big Data Analysis. The platf ...

In 2016, AWS introduced the EKK stack (Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon Kinesis, and Kibana, an open source plugin from Elastic) as an alternative to ELK (Amazon Elasticsearch Service, the open source tool Logstash, and Kibana) for ingesting and visualizing Apache logs. One of the main features of the EKK stack is that the data transformation is handled via the Amazon Kinesis Firehose agent. In this pos ...

This is the sixth post in a multi-part series about how you can perform complex streaming analytics using Apache Spark. Traditionally, when people think about streaming, terms such as “real-time,” “24/7,” or “always on” come to mind. You may have cases where data only arrives at fixed intervals. That is, data appears every hour or once a day. For these use cases, it is still beneficial to perform incrementa ...

Data warehousing workloads are known for high variability due to seasonality, potentially expensive exploratory queries, and the varying skill levels of SQL developers. To obtain high performance in the face of highly variable workloads, Amazon Redshift workload management (WLM) enables you to flexibly manage priorities and resource usage. With WLM, short, fast-running queries don’t get stuck in queues behi ...

Google has recently announced that its flagship wide-area database named Spanner has been made available on the Google Cloud. Google Spanner is the next generation globally-distributed database built inside Google and announced to the world through the paper published in OSDI 2012 [1]. This article explores the implication of Google Spanner, in particular to the NoSQL world. CAP Theorem: A Quick Recap The t ...