Interview with Srini Penchikala, Lead Editor, InfoQ.com Speaker at Dallas Big Data Bootcamp May 13-15 2016 Posted on : Apr 24 - 2016

We feature speakers at Big Data Bootcamp Dallas May 13-15 2016 to catch up and find out what he or she is working on now and what's coming next. This week we're talking to Srini Penchikala, Lead Editor, InfoQ.com.

Interview with Srini Penchikala

Tell us about yourself and your background.

I work as Software Architect with background in designing and implementing enterprise software applications in financial services organizations.

I also work as the Lead Editor at InfoQ.com team for Data Science community. As part of this role, I publish articles and books on NoSQL and Big Data topics. I have spoken at various conferences like JavaOne, Enterprise Data World, NoSQL Now, and AppSec in the past.

What have you been working on recently?

I am currently focusing on the four pillars of modern distributed data computing & application architectures: NoSQL Databases, Big Data technologies, Microservices, and Containers. All these technologies, when used together, define the complete architecture lifecycle.

This will be the focus of my sessions at the Big Data Bootcamp Conference because it's important to know about all the technologies so you can be an all round big data professional.

Why do you think Architects, DBA, Admins,  Managers, Executives & Data Scientists should attend Big Data Bootcamp Dallas May 13-15 2016?

This bootcamp conference enables the attendees of all backgrounds and levels of experience, to learn the new and emerging technologies in a way that the attendees can start using the design patterns, technologies and tools right away in their projects.

Hands-on learning is the main goal of the sessions, so you can learn not only what are the big data technologies and why they are "must learn" in the current technoloy landscape but also how to apply what you learn in the real world projects and initiatives. It gives the opportunity for every attendee to become a holistic big data professional after attending the conference.

Do you feel any urgency you want to pass along to your industry peers to implement Big Data projects with their data? Why?

Big data solutions help uncover the hidden insights from the data you already have in your organization and don't have an affordable way of processing and mining that data. Big data strategies are not only defining the business models of some organizations, they are also shaping the future of which companies will stay in the business. Big data technologies have become mainstream and now it's the question of why a company doesn't have a big data strategy yet, than the other way around.

What are some of the best takeaways that the attendees can have from your workshops?
 Spark Workshop
Attendees will learn how to use SQL interface to Spark framework and Graph data processing using Spark SQL & Spark GraphX libraries respectively. The workshop will be 60-70% hands-on exercises and 30-40% theory/presentations. We will follow use case driven approach so the attendees can learn about how we can apply Spark based big data solutions to solve the business problems and opportunities.
 
Cassandra Workshop
Cassandra is a special NoSQL database used for storing tabular/column family type of data. The database is specialized for high performance DB writes with clients like Netflix are able to achieve over 10 million writes per second. Outside of storing unstructured data, Cassandra comes with several other benefits like data partitioning and replication capabilities out of the box. Server failover is also easy to setup.

There will be a dedicated group exercise to discuss different use cases for using Cassandra in real world projects and develop physical data models to address the business requirements of these use cases. We have tried this in the previous conferences and got great feedback that it helped the attendees to apply Cassandra data modeling techniques for specific and diverse use cases. Learning by applying the techniques we discuss in the workshop is the best part of this bootcamp conference.

Microservices Workshop
Microservices complement the polyglot architectures that NoSQL databases and Big Data technologies bring to the enterprise architecture models. We will work on few different use cases of microservices in this session. You will learn how to develop and deploy microservices. You will also work on microservices discovery and failover requirements.
 
Docker and Containers Tutorial
Container technologies provide the mechanism to deploy software applications and services in independent deployment environments. Containers complement other techniques like NoSQL databases and microservices to realize agile enterprise architectures by providing isolated deployment models to deploy nosql databases, big data solutions, and microservices.

Any closing remarks?

I have been a speaker at Big Data Bootcamp conferences since 2013. It's one of my favorite events to talk about the emerging trends and technologies that are shaping the way we think, develop and deploy applications in our organizations no matter what size the company is.