Big thanks to Canonical for helping out putting on a great stand at Big Data London today and tomorrow whilst having OpenStack nonsense going on!
Very busy stand and a lot of people drawn over by the Ubuntu signage which helps 
Overall the feedback was very positive, and people swinging by the booth showed a decent amount of interest into the platform.
Some regular Big Data related questions that kept popping up:
- We’ve never heard of juju can you explain what it is
- Hadoop Level Security
- Integration with on prem security systems
- How does support work, how can I pay for it?
- Is it container based?
Somewhat surprising to me I didn’t get any “do you support product X” which tells me the platform is pretty full featured. Security came up so many times though, so there’s some work to be done there and I need to finish the Apache Ranger charm I started.
Whilst the news the other day suggested Hadoop was dying when Cloudera merged with Hortonworks, feedback at the event suggests otherwise with many users using large Hadoop clusters. A lot of on-prem systems still due to data sensitivity and more so with GDPR coming into effect.
Some people interested in ML, but most still looking to gain insight from large volumes of data. Also quite a few questions about data management, storage and cataloguing, there is something we can do there.
People were asking where we sat in the market and so we did our best to explain we sit somewhere between the old school Cloudera/Hortonworks and the major cloud vendors. So you get the ability to deploy your software on demand, get billed on demand(when CC access arrives), but more traditional support that you’d expect from a data vendor.
An interesting crowd from junior developers to Bank Sys Admins, and open data experts.
My brain hurts and my back aches, back tomorrow!