Introduction to Analytics Stack on GCP
Before moving forward to building an Analytics Stack on Google Cloud Platform, let's take a look at what A stack is? While many of us might confuse it with the Data Structure stack but that is not the case here. A stack here can be referred to as a collection of technologies. As technologies and the cloud are being evolved every second, we can integrate technologies/applications into our software/solution stack. Every business is refining its process by incorporating refined software stacks.Exploring productized analytics solutions is important because companies rely on analytics to understand big data and compete in today’s data-driven landscape. Source: Leveraging Stacks
Building stack makes it easier to work with components as it brings modularity, increasing composability. Only with the oldest trick in the playbook divide and conquer while building a stack we break down complex components into simpler pieces that can be enhanced by adding other technologies just like the data structure stack!
What is Analytics Stack?
At the most rudimentary level it is the bridge between raw data. It is the combination of coherent applications that combine and probe to realize the value of data. Let us look at an analogy like water data is necessary and pipelines bring it to your reservoir. As a building needs good plumbing, an organization that envisions to become data-driven and want to tap into this un extracted wealth needs a well-maintain it and have a competitive edge over others. As the most profitable businesses continue to set new benchmarks for productivity and innovation, their rivals, regardless of scale, must adopt analytics to stay competitive. Fortunately, the elements of an analytics stack are getting easier to set up, maintain, and scale at a lower cost.What is Data Warehouse?
With the amount of data flowing and the idea of stack add on the weight of maintaining it, it becomes crucial to have it for any company that wants to extract and get real value from their data. However, after working out solutions from existing resources, companies head towards a roadblock where they discover they lack the infrastructure to use their data fruitfully. They might not have the skill set required to analyze the information and change with it effectively. Every module, every component of it requires a uniques skillset. While there are many big sharks in the tank, let us talk about Google to build an analytics stack.
Enable Real-Time Stream Ingestion, storage and processing to drive game-changing, Enterprise level significant improvements. Click to explore about our, Real-Time Analytics Services and Solutions
Building Analytics Stack with GCP (Google Cloud Platform)
Ingest (app engine, pub/sub, cloud functions) While we Build an analytics stack on the GCP. We can explain components that can helps under different categoriesIngest/ETL
Listed below are the components help for building it on the google cloud platform.
Cloud Functions
Google Cloud Functions are a serverless environment that enables you to build cloud applications. It is a lightweight compute solution that allows you to build stand-alone serverless applications without any overhead burden to manage the environment or servers. You write simple single-purpose applications run in an event-driven architecture with cloud functions.
Pub/Sub
It is an asynchronous mange service that enables you to build true event-driven applications by decoupling applications from each other. It helps to ingest data at high speed, high availability in real-time for streaming applications. Pub/Sub by google generally helps with Balancing workload in network cluster, implementing asynchronous workflows, distributing event notifications, Refreshing distributed caches, Logging to multiple systems, Data streaming from various processes or devices, and most importantly, Reliability improvement.
App Engine
App Engine is a container service on Google's infrastructure available preconfigures with several available runtimes. It enables you to build and deploy load-heavy applications with the ability to process large volumes of data. Application run-in their own, independent containers enabling multi-server access that are easy to scale and have no overhead burden to manage Cloud applications
Dataflow
Capturing, analyzing, and real-time processing data is a tedious task. In addition to it, the data coming might be unstructured or semi-structured that is difficult to process and is not in the apt format required by the dependent downstream applications. GCP provides a solution for this, Dataflow. Data is a stream and batch processing service and is fast and cost-effective. Dataflow helps make the process automate and scale quickly with any managing clusters burden. It is based on a simple source-sink architecture to transform your data. It provides modularity and apache beam SDK that can be developed in languages like python and java.
Dataprep
Analysts and data scientists often fix that the data provided is not ready for immediate use and spend most of their time cleaning data. This is where data prep comes into play by escalating the process and makes business more responsive and data-driven. It is a visual data cleaning service that can visualize data, explore data, clean the data, and prepare data for further use.
Modern DW requires Petabytes of storage and more optimized techniques to run complex analytic queries. Click to explore about our, Modern Data Warehouse Architecture
Data Warehouse
Big Query helps in Data Warehouse for building it on google cloud platform.
Big Query
While we build a stack, the most crucial key feature is data. Storing and querying this data might be time-consuming. The Big Query is google's data warehouse that solves the problem by incorporating fast SQL queries with the enterprise's reliable infrastructure.
Dashboarding
Data Studio helps to build Dashboard on analytics stack on GCP.
Data Studio
Google is a free tool that helps to visualize data easily, informative, and shareable in the form of customizable dashboards. Allow connecting to various data sources. Visualize data with highly configurable charts and tables. Data Studio enables you to share informative insights with the team by speeding up the report creation process. In short, it allows you to narrate your Data through a story.
Monitoring
Stack Driver helps for monitoring the Analytics Stack.
Stack Driver
It provides you with powerful monitoring analysis and diagnostics in the google cloud platform. Stack Driver equips you with insights into applications' health and performance, enabling you to find and fix issues faster.
Reporting pattern detections and exhaustion predictions.
- Stack Driver Monitoring - It provides insight into longer-term trends that might require retention. Provides a single integrated service alerting dashboards, metrics, and uptime services, indeed reducing time on managing different systems.
- Stack Driver Logging - It provides logging services to analyze logs, generating outlines to trace the issues resolve errors, bugs, and hotfixes much faster.
- Stack Driver Debugger - Helps in seeing the state of running application with no effect on the performance of applications.
- Driver Trace for Stack - This is the tracing system that gets data from your app engine applications and displays it to you in NRT (Near real-time).
- Driver Profiler for Stack- Helps you with getting your actual compute time to provide you with CPU usage that can be used to get estimated pricing.
Conclusion
Hence for concluding, we can say GCP provides you with a variety of technologies to build up an analytics stack on google cloud platform without the overhead of managing clusters and configurations. You can build an analytics pipeline from scratch from ingesting to ETL to prepare data warehousing to monitor. All can be done at a place with an enterprise's reliability infrastructure.Our Recommendation for your next read
- Discover here about Google Analytics and Its Capabilities
- Click to know about 10 Latest Trends in Big Data Analytics
