Today’s always-on businesses and 24×7 uptime demands have necessitated IT monitoring to go into overdrive. While constant monitoring is a good thing, the downside is that the flood of alerts generated can quickly get overwhelming. Constantly having to deal with thousands of alerts each day causes alert fatigue, and impacts the overall efficiency of the monitoring process.
Hence, chalking out an optimal strategy for alert generation & management becomes critical. Pattern-based thresholding is an important first step, since it tunes thresholds continuously, to adapt to what ‘normal’ is, for the real-time environment. Threshold accuracy eliminates false positives and prevents alerts from getting fired incorrectly. Selective alert suppression during routine IT Ops maintenance activities like backups, patches, or upgrades, is another. While there are many other strategies to keep alert numbers under control, a key process in alert management is the grouping of alerts, known as alert correlation. It groups similar alerts under one actionable incident, thereby reducing the number of alerts to be handled individually.
But, how is alert ‘similarity’ determined? One way to do this is through similarity definitions, in the context of that IT landscape. A definition, for instance, would group together alerts generated from applications on the same host, or connectivity issues from the same data center. This implies that similarity definitions depend on the physical and logical relationships in the environment – in other words – the topology map. Topology mappers detect dependencies between applications, processes, networks, infrastructure, etc., and construct an enterprise blueprint that is used for alert correlation.
But what about related alerts generated by entities that are neither physically nor logically linked? To give a hypothetical example, let’s say application A accesses a server S which is responding slowly, and so A triggers alert A1. This slow communication of A with S eats up host bandwidth, and hence affects another application B in the same host. Due to this, if a third application C from another host calls B, alert A2 is fired by C due to the delayed response from B. Now, although we see the link between alerts A1 & A2, they are neither physically nor logically related, so how can they be correlated? In reality, such situations could imply thousands of individual alerts that cannot be combined.
This is one of the many challenges in IT operations that we have been trying to solve at GAVS. The correlation engine of our AIOps Platform ZIF uses algorithmic alert correlation to find a solution for this problem. We are working on two unsupervised machine learning algorithms that are fundamentally different in their approach – one based on pattern recognition and the other based on spatial clustering. Both algorithms can function with or without a topology map, and work around what is supplied and available. The pattern learning algorithm derives associations based on learnings from historic patterns of alert relationships. The spatial clustering algorithm works on the principle of similarity based on multiple features of alerts, including problem similarity derived by applying Natural Language Processing (NLP), and relationships, among several others. Tuning parameters enable customization of algorithmic behavior to meet specific demands, without requiring modifications to the core algorithms. Time is also another important dimension factored into these algorithms, since the clustering of alerts generated over an extended period of time will not give meaningful results.
The traditional alert correlation has not been able to scale up to handle the volume and complexity of alerts generated by the modern-day hybrid and dynamic IT infrastructure. We have reached a point where our ITOps needs have surpassed the limits of human capabilities, and so, supplementing our intelligence with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning has now become indispensable.
About the Author –
Padmapriya Sridhar
Priya is part of the Marketing team at GAVS. She is passionate about Technology, Indian Classical Arts, Travel, and Yoga. She aspires to become a Yoga Instructor someday!
Gireesh Sreedhar KP
Gireesh is a part of the projects run in collaboration with IIT Madras for developing AI solutions and algorithms. His interest includes Data Science, Machine Learning, Financial markets, and Geo-politics. He believes that he is competing against himself to become better than who he was yesterday. He aspires to become a well-recognized subject matter expert in the field of Artificial Intelligence.
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services including Servers, Database, Storage, Networking, and others over the internet. Public, Private, and Hybrid clouds are different ways of deploying cloud computing.
In a public cloud, the cloud resources are owned by 3rd party cloud service providers
A private cloud consists of computing resources exclusively by one business or organization
Hybrid provides the best of both worlds, combines on-premises infrastructure, private cloud with public cloud
Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Oracle, IBM, and others are providing cloud platforms to users to host and experience practical business solutions. The worldwide public cloud services market is forecast to grow 17% in 2020 to total $266.4 billion and $354.6 billion in 2022, up from $227.8 billion in 2019, per Gartner, Inc.
There are various types of Instances, workloads and options available as part of the cloud ecosystem, i.e. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, Multi-cloud, Serverless.
Challenges
When very large, large and medium enterprises decide to move their IT environment from on-premise to cloud, they try to move some/most of their on-premises into cloud and keep the rest under their control on-premise. There are various factors that impact the decision, to name a few,
ROI vs Cost of Cloud Instance, Operation cost
Architecture dependency of the application, i.e. whether it is monolithic or multi-tier or polyglot or hybrid cloud
Requirement and need for elasticity and scalability
Availability of right solution from the cloud provider
Security of some key data
After crossing all, once the IT environment is cloud enabled, the challenge comes in ensuring the monitoring of the cloud enabled IT environment. Here are some of the business and IT challenges
How to ensure the various workloads and Instances are working as expected?
While the cloud provider may give high availability and uptime depending on the tier we choose, it is important that our IT team monitors the environment, as in the case of IaaS and to some extent in PaaS as well.
How to ensure the Instances are optimally used in terms of computing and storage?
Cloud providers give most of the metrics around the Instances, though it may not provide all the metrics that we may need to make decisions in every possible scenario.
The disadvantages of this model are cost, latency and not straight forward, e.g. the LOG analytics which comes in Azure involves cost for every MB/GB of data that is stored and the latency in getting the right metrics at right time, if there is latency/delay, you may not get the right result.
How to ensure the Application or the components of a single solution that are spread across On-Premise and Cloud environment is working as expected?
Some cloud providers give tools for integrating the metrics from on-premise to the cloud environment to have a shared view.
The disadvantage of this model is that it is not possible to bring in all sorts of data together to get the insights straight. That is, observability is always a question. The ownership of getting the observability lies with the IT team who handles the data.
How to ensure that the Multi-Cloud + On-Premise environment is effectively monitored and utilized for the best end-user experience?
Multi-Cloud environment – With rapidly growing Microservices Architecture and Container-based cloud enabled model, it is quite natural that the enterprise may choose the best from different cloud providers like Azure, AWS, Google, and others.
There is little support from cloud provider on this space. In fact, some cloud providers do not even support this scenario.
How to get a single panel of view for troubleshooting and root cause analysis?
Especially when issues crop up in Application, Database, Middle Tier, Network and 3rd party layers that are spread across multi-cluster, multi-cloud, elastic environment, it is very important to get a unified view of entire environment.
ZIF (Zero Incident FrameworkTM) provides a single platform for Cloud Monitoring.
ZIF has Discovering, Monitoring, Predicting and Remediating capabilities. It provides the unified dashboard with insights across all layers of IT infrastructure that is distributed across On-premise host, Cloud Instance and Containers.
Core features of ZIF for Cloud are,
Discovery and Topology
Real-time mapping of applications and its dependent layers irrespective of whether the components live on-premise, or on cloud or containerized in cloud.
Dynamically built topology of all layers which helps in taking effective decisions.
Observability across Multi-Cloud and On-Premise tiers
Analysis of the monitored data to come up with meaningful insights.
Unified view of the entire IT environment, especially important when the IT infrastructure is spread across multiple cloud platform like Azure, AWS, Google Cloud and others.
Root cause analysis
Quick root cause analysis by analysing various causes captured by ZIF Monitor instead of going through layer by layer. This saves time to focus on problem solving and arresting instead of spending effort on identifying the root cause.
Insights across your workload including the impact due to 3rd party layers.
Container and Microservice support
Understand the resource utilization of your containers that are hosted in the cloud and on-premise.
Know the bottlenecks around the Microservices and tune your environment for the spikes in load.
Get full support for monitoring applications distributed across your local host and containers in cloud in a multi-cluster setup.
End-User Experience
Helps improve the experience of the end-user getting served by the workload from cloud.
Helps to trace each and every request of each and every user, thus it is quite natural for ZIF to unearth the performance bottlenecks across all layers which in turn improves the user experience.
Metrics driven decision for resource optimization
Provides meaningful insights and alerts in terms of the surge in the load, the growth in number of VMs, containers and the usage of resource across other workloads.
Enables authorization of Elasticity and Scalability through well informed metrics.
ZIF Seamlessly integrates with following Cloud and Container environments,
Microsoft Azure
AWS
Google Cloud
Docker
Kubernetes
Watch for this space for more Use cases around ZIF for Cloud.
About the Author –
Suresh Kumar Ramasamy
Suresh heads the Monitor component of ZIF at GAVS. He has 20 years of experience in Native Applications, Web, Cloud, and Hybrid platforms from Engineering to Product Management. He has designed & hosted the monitoring solutions. He has been instrumental in conglomerating components to structure the Environment Performance Management suite of ZIF Monitor.
Suresh enjoys playing badminton with his children. He is passionate about gardening, especially medicinal plants.
In my previous article (zif.ai/inverse-reinforcement-learning/), I had introduced Inverse Reinforcement Learning and explained how it differs from Reinforcement Learning. In this article, let’s explore Generative Adversarial Networks or GAN; both GAN and reinforcement learning help us understand how deep learning is trying to imitate human thinking.
With access to greater hardware power, Neural Networks have made great progress. We use them to recognize images and voice at levels comparable to humans sometimes with even better accuracy. Even with all of that we are very far from automating human tasks with machines because a tremendous amount of information is out there and to a large extent easily accessible in the digital world of bits. The tricky part is to develop models and algorithms that can analyze and understand this humongous amount of data.
GAN in a way comes close to achieving the above goal with what we call automation, we will see the use cases of GAN later in this article.
This technique is very new to the Machine Learning (ML) world. GAN is a deep learning, unsupervised machine learning technique proposed by Ian Goodfellow and few other researchers including Yoshua Bengio in 2014. One of the most prominent researcher in the deep learning area, Yann LeCun described it as “the most interesting idea in the last 10 years in Machine Learning”.
What is Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)?
A GAN is a machine learning model in which two neural networks compete to become more accurate in their predictions. GANs typically run unsupervised and use a cooperative zero-sum game framework to learn.
The logic of GANs lie in the rivalry between the two Neural Nets. It mimics the idea of rivalry between a picture forger and an art detective who repeatedly try to outwit one another. Both networks are trained on the same data set.
A generative adversarial network (GAN) has two parts:
The generator (the artist) learns to generate plausible data. The generated instances become negative training examples for the discriminator.
The discriminator (the critic) learns to distinguish the generator’s fake data from real data. The discriminator penalizes the generator for producing implausible results.
GAN can be compared with Reinforcement Learning, where the generator is receiving a reward signal from the discriminator letting it know whether the generated data is accurate or not.
During training, the generator tries to become better at generating real looking images, while the discriminator trains to be better classify those images as fake. The process reaches equilibrium at a point when the discriminator can no longer distinguish real images from fakes.
Here are the steps a GAN takes:
The input to the generator is random numbers which returns an image.
The output image of the generator is fed as input to the discriminator along with a stream of images taken from the actual dataset.
Both real and fake images are given to the discriminator which returns probabilities, a number between 0 and 1, 1 meaning a prediction of authenticity and 0 meaning fake.
So, you have a double feedback loop in the architecture of GAN:
We have a feedback loop with the discriminator having ground truth of the images from actual training dataset
The generator is, in turn, in a feedback loop along with the discriminator.
Most GANs today are at least loosely based on the DCGAN architecture (Radford et al., 2015). DCGAN stands for “deep, convolution GAN.” Though GANs were both deep and convolutional prior to DCGANs, the name DCGAN is useful to refer to this specific style of architecture.
Applications of GAN
Now that we know what GAN is and how it works, it is time to dive into the interesting applications of GANs that are commonly used in the industry right now.
Can you guess what’s common among all the faces in this image?
None of these people are real! These faces were generated by GANs, exciting and at the same time scary, right? We will focus about the ethical application of the GAN in the article.
GANs for Image Editing
Using GANs, appearances can be drastically changed by reconstructing the images.
GANs for Security
GANs has been able to address the concern of ‘adversarial attacks’.
These adversarial attacks use a variety of techniques to fool deep learning architectures. Existing deep learning models are made more robust to these techniques by GANs by creating more such fake examples and training the model to identify them.
Generating Data with GANs
The availability of data in certain domains is a necessity, especially in domains where training data is needed to model learning algorithms. The healthcare industry comes to mind here. GANs shine again as they can be used to generate synthetic data for supervision.
GANs for 3D Object Generation
GANs are quite popular in the gaming industry. Game designers work countless hours recreating 3D avatars and backgrounds to give them a realistic feel. And, it certainly takes a lot of effort to create 3D models by imagination. With the incredible power of GANs, wherein they can be used to automate the entire process!
GANs are one of the few successful techniques in unsupervised machine learning and it is evolving quickly and improving our ability to perform generative tasks. Since most of the successful applications of GANs have been in the domain of computer vision, generative model sure has a lot of potential, but is not without some drawbacks.
About the Author –
Naresh B
Naresh is a part of Location Zero at GAVS as an AI/ML solutions developer. His focus is on solving problems leveraging AI/ML. He strongly believes in making success as a habit rather than considering it as a destination. In his free time, he likes to spend time with his pet dogs and likes sketching and gardening.
In my previous article https://bit.ly/2T7DO9r, we saw the brief introduction and terminologies of Lambda Architecture. Let’s jump on to its various implementation patterns in the enterprises.
Lambda data processing architecture can be implemented in three
ways,
GenericLambdaλArchitecture.
Unified LambdaλArchitecture.
Multi-Agent Lambdaλ Architecture (MALA)
Generic Lambda λ Architecture
The three layers of Generic λ
Batch Layer-The The master data is managed here, and the batch views are precomputed.
Speed Layer-This layer serves recent data only and increments the real-time views
Serving Layer-This layer is responsible for indexing and exposing the views so that they can be queried.
How does Generic Lambdaλ Architecture work?
The new information collected, or ingested data is sent simultaneously
to both Batch and Speed/Streaming layers for processing. The batch layer,
called ‘Data Lake’, handles two vital tasks.
1) Managing the master data set (Data Lake), which is an immutable append-only raw data.
2) Precomputing the batch views on business-relevant aggregations
and metrics.
The computation from Batch Layer is fed into Serving Layer which indexes
the batch views, for a low latency query.
In the Speed layer or Streaming layer, the views are transient in nature, since only new data is considered to compensate for the high latency of the writes.
A serving layer can be a presentation side/reporting layer aimed
to handle both batch reporting as well as real-time reporting. At the
presentation side, queries are answered by merging both batch and real-time
views.
Generic Lambdaλ is technology agnostic
The data pipeline can be broken down into layers with clear delineation of roles and responsibilities and at each layer, we can choose from several technologies. For instance, in the speed layer any of Apache Storm or Apache Spark Streaming, or spring ‘XD’ (eXtreme Data)could be employed.
Speed Layer Components
The following table represents some of the Stream Processing Frameworks, that are well suited for the speed components.
Apache Storm
Apache Storm is an open-source, distributed, and advanced Big Data processing engine that processes the real-time streaming data at an unprecedented speed, way faster than Apache Hadoop. What Hadoop does for batch processing, Apache Storm does for unbounded streams of data in a reliable manner.
Apache Storm can process over a million jobs
on a node in a fraction of a second.
It is integrated with Hadoop to harness higher
throughputs.
It is easy to implement and can be integrated
with any programming language.
Apache Spark Streaming
Spark Streaming was added to Apache Spark in 2013, an extension of the core Spark API that enables scalable, high-throughput, fault-tolerant stream processing of live data streams. Data is ingested from varied sources like Apache Kafka, Flume, Kinesis and can be processed using complex algorithms expressed with high-level functions like map, reduce, join, and window. The processed data can be pushed out to filesystems, databases, and live dashboards. Spark’s machine learning and graph processing algorithms can be applied to data streams.
Spring XD (eXtreme Data)
Spring XD (eXtreme Data) is a unified, distributed, and extensible service for data ingestion, real-time analytics, batch processing, and data export.
The Spring Data team has via Spring XD has provided support for NoSQL datastores and has also simplified the development experience with Hadoop. Spring XD is built on the fundamental blocks of Apache Hadoop. Also, it uses various pre-existing Spring technologies. For instance, Spring Data supports NoSQL/Hadoop work, Spring Batch is employed to support the workflow orchestration with job state management and retry/restart capabilities, and Spring Integration manages the event-driven data ingestion stream processing and the various Enterprise Application Integration patterns. Spring Reactor provides simplified API for developing asynchronous applications using the LMAX Disruptor.
Batch layer Components
Similarly, in Batch Layer frameworks like Apache Pig, Apache MapReduce and Apache spark can be employed. The Processing Frameworks that are commonly used in the batch layer are outlined below.
Apache Hadoop MapReduce
Hadoop MapReduce is a paradigm and software framework for writing applications that process large amounts of data on large clusters of commodity hardware in a parallel, reliable, fault-tolerant manner. MapReduce programs are written in various languages like Java, Ruby, Python, and C++ can be run in Apache Hadoop platform.
Apache Pig
Apache Pig is an abstraction over MapReduce and a tool/platform for analyzing large data sets that consists of a high-level language for expressing data analysis programs, coupled with infrastructure for evaluating these programs. To address the problem of programs generating series of Map and Reduce stages in MapReduce, Apache Pig creates an abstraction over them. The most noticeable property of Pig programs is that their structure is amenable to substantial parallelization, which in turn enables them to handle very large data sets.
Apache Spark
Apache
Spark is the largest open source project in Big data processing. It is a blazing-fast
cluster computing technology, designed for fast computation. It is based on
Hadoop MapReduce and it extends the MapReduce model to efficiently use it for
more types of computations, which includes interactive queries and stream
processing. The main feature of Spark is its in-memory cluster computing that
increases the processing speed of an application.
Serving Layer Components
Technologies or Merge/Low-Latency Databases like Druid, Apache HBase, Elephant DB, Apache SOLR, Elasticsearch, Azure Cosmos DB, MongoDB, VoltDBcan be employed for speed-layer output.
Limitations of GenericLambda λ architecture
Write everything twice
In the generic lambda architecture, the data must be written twice i.e. data is sent to both the speed layer and the batch layer as it is created. Any logic is duplicated and implemented twice. The batch layer takes a while to produce results so the speed layer does the same work so it can answer questions about in-flight events and recent activities.
Two execution paths
There are always two separate execution paths for streaming and batch. It’s a maintenance nightmare, where dealing with a plethora of frameworks, components, and clusters.
Two programming models
Typically, an undesirable effect of Generic Lambda is that the codebases tend to diverge since the code that executes in a batch world works on a large but finite data set while a real-time stream processing system works on an infinite event stream.
Diverse skill sets
Just to manage the platform, more developers
with diverse skill sets are needed than focusing on core business problems.
Conclusion
It is evident that the Generic Lambda λ fits best for the system that has fast data i.e. high velocity of data and Data Lake i.e. system that involves complex processing of both historical (re-computational) and real-time (incremental) aggregated view with nearly unlimited memory capacity and data storage space. Use cases like login gestion (syslog’s, application logs, weblogs), which are one-way data pipelines are some of the areas where the Generic Lambda λ shines the brightest. But having known the limitations of the Generic lambda λ, there is always a constant search to address its limitations. Let’s continue to explore to find solutions in the next part.
Happy Learning!
About the Author:
Bargunan Somasundaram
Bargunan is a Big Data Engineer and a programming enthusiast. His passion is to share his knowledge by writing his experiences about them. He believes “Gaining knowledge is the first step to wisdom and sharing it is the first step to humanity.”
Zero Incident FrameworkTM (ZIF) is an AIOps based TechOps platform that enables proactive detection and remediation of incidents helping organizations drive towards a Zero Incident Enterprise™. ZIF comprises of 5 modules, as outlined below.
This
article’s focus is on the Remediate function of ZIF. Most ITSM teams envision a
future of ticketless ITSM, driven by AI and Automation.
Remediate
being a key module ofZIF, has more than 500+ connectors to various ITSMtools,
Monitoring, Security and Incident management tools, storage/backup tools and
others.Few of the connectors are referenced below that enables quick automation
building.
Key Features of Remediate
Truly Agent-less software.
300+ readily available templates – intuitive workflow/activity-based tool for process automation from a rich repository of pre-coded activities/templates.
No coding or programming required to create/deploy automated workflows. Easy drag & drop to sequence activities for workflow design.
Workflow execution scheduling for pre-determined time or triggering from events/notifications via email or SMS alerts.
Can be installed on-premise or on the cloud, on physical or virtual servers
Self Service portal for end-users/admins/help-desk to handle tasks &remediation automatically
Fully automated service management life cycle from incident creation to resolution and automatic closure
Has integration packs for all leading ITSM tools
Key features for futuristic Automation Solutions
Although the
COVID pandemic has landed us in unprecedented times, we have been able to
continue supporting our customers and enabled their IT operations with ZIF
Remediate.
Self-learning capability to deliver Predictive/Prescriptive actionable alerts.
Access to multiple data sources and types – events, metrics, thresholds, logs, event triggers e.g. mail or SMS.
Support for a wide range of automation
Interactive Automation – Web, SMS, and email
Non-interactive automation – Silent based on events/trigger points
Supporting a wide range of advanced heuristics.
Benefits of AIOPS driven Automation
Faster
MTTR
Instant
identification of threats and appropriate responses
Faster
delivery of IT services
Quality
services leading to Employee and Customer satisfaction
Fulfillment
and Alignment of IT services to business performance
Interactive and Non-interactive automation
Through our automation journey so far, we have understood that the best automation empowers humans, rather than replacing them. By implementing ZIF Remediate, organizations can empower their people to focus their attention on critical thinking and value-added activities and let our platform handle mundane tasks by bringing data-driven insights for decision making.
Interactive Automation – Web portal, Chatbot and
SMS based
Non-interactive automations – Event or trigger
driven automation
Involved decision
driven Automations
ZIF Remediate has its unique, interactive automation capabilities, where many automation tools do not allow interactive decision making. Need approvals built into an automated change management process that involves sensitive aspects of your environment? Need numerous decision points that demand expert approval or oversight? We have the solution for you. Take an example of Phishing automation, here a domain or IP is blocked based on insights derived by mimicking an SOC engineer’s actions – parsing the observables i.e. URL, suspicious links or attachments in a phish mail and have those observables validated for threat against threat response tools, virus total, and others.
Some of the key benefits realized by our customers which include one of the largest manufacturing organizations, a financial services company, a large PR firm, health care organizations, and others.
Reduction of MTTR by 30% across various service requests.
Reduction of 40% of incidents/tickets, thus enabling productivity improvements.
Ticket triaging process automation resulting in a reduction of time taken by 50%.
Reclaiming TBs of storage space every week through snapshot monitoring and approval-driven model for a large virtualized environment.
Eliminating manual threat analysis by Phishing Automation, leading to man-hours being redirected towards more critical work.
Reduction of potential P1 outages by 40% through self-healing automations.
Alwin leads the Product Engineering for ZIF Remediate and zIrrus. He has over 20 years of IT experience spanning across Program & Portfolio Management for large customer accounts of various business verticals.
In his free time, Alwin loves going for long drives, travelling to scenic locales, doing social work and reading & meditating the Bible.
Architecture inspires people, no wonder so many famous writers, artists, politicians, and designers have such profound and fascinating observations about architecture. Whether embracing minimalism or adoring resplendence, everyone has experiences and tastes that shape the way they interact with the world. The Greek architectural beauties have captured the imagination of many. The crown jewel of their architecture is the “post and lintel” which was used for their grand, large, open-air structures that could accommodate 20,000 spectators.
Greeks are also famous for their Alphabets. When the Greek Architecture and Alphabets are merged, the state-of-the-art overarching “Big Data Processing Architecture” is produced; Lambda λ, kappa κ, and Zeta ζ.
Big Data Architectural patterns
The evolution of the technologies in Big Data in the last decade has presented a history of battles with growing data volume. An increasing number of systems are being built to handle the Volume, Velocity, Variety, Veracity, Validity, and Volatility of Big Data and help gain new insights and make better business decisions. A well-designed big data architecture must handle the 6 V’s of Big Data, save your company money, and help predict future trends.
Lambda (λ) Architecture
The Lambda Architecture λis an emerging paradigm in Big Data computing.
The name lambda architecture is derived from a functional point of view of data
processingi.e. all data processing is understood as the application of a
function to all data.
Lambda architecture is popular for its data processing technique of handling huge amounts of data by taking advantage of both a batch layer and a speed/stream-processing layer. This specific approach attempts to balance latency, throughput, and fault-tolerance by using batch processing to provide comprehensive and accurate views of batch data, while simultaneously using real-time stream processing to provide views of online data. The outputs from both batch and speed layers can be merged before the presentation.
The efficiency of this architecture becomes evident in the form of increased throughput, reduced latency, and negligible errors, thus resulting in a linearly scalable architecture that scales out rather than scaling up.
Basic tenets of Lambda Architecture
The Lambda Architecture achieves high scalability and low
latency due to the following principles,
Immutability of Data
Data Denormalization
Precomputed Views
Immutability of Data
The Big Data immutability is based on similar principles as the immutability in programming data structures. The goal being the same – do not change the data in-place and instead create a new one. The data can’t be altered and deleted. This rule can be defined for eternity or for a specified time period.
Immutable data is fundamentally simpler than mutable data. The idea here is not to change the data in-place i.e. no updating or deleting of records but creating new ones. Now, this could be time-bound or for the eternity. Thus, write operations only add new data units. In CRUD parlance only CR (Create & Read) and no UD (Update & Delete).
This approach makes data handling highly scalable because it is very easy to distribute and replicate data. This immutable model makes the data aggregation kind of a logging system. With the attributes like “data creation timestamp”, the old and the most recent version can be distinguished. Apache Kafka – an append-only distributed log system is a great example of an immutable data store.
As a drawback, even more, data is generated, and answering queries becomes more difficult. For example, to find the current owner of a brand, the owner for that brand with the latest timestamp must be found.
In the mutable data model, it is no longer possible to find out that the brand Jaguar was once owned by Ford. This is different when using an immutable data model which is achieved by adding a timestamp to each data record.
Now it is possible to get both bits of information: the fact that Jaguar is now owned by Tata Motors (latest timestamp) and the fact it was formerly owned by Ford. It is also much easier to recover from errors because the old information is not deleted.
Data Denormalization
The traditional database systems are named for their storage efficiency and data integrity. It is possible due to the Normalization process like 1NF, 2NF, 3NF, BCNF, 4NF, and 5NF. Due to efficient normalization strategy, data redundancy is eliminated. The same data need not be saved in multiple places (tables) and any updates (partial or full) on the same, need not be done at multiple places (tables). But this makes the traditional databases poor at scaling their read performance since data from multiple places (tables) need to be brought together by complex and costly join operations.
For the sake of performance, Big data systems accept denormalization and duplication of data as a fact of life with the data schema such that data stored in-representation is equivalent to that after performing joins on normalized tables.
In this way, the knowledge about the schema is not necessary, and joins can be avoided, and the query results are faster. This also motivates the query-driven data modeling methodology. Albeit the data exists in multiple places after denormalization, the consistency of the data is ensured via strong consistency, timeline consistency, and eventual consistency models in the event of partial or full updates. This is often acceptable, especially when denormalized representations are used as precomputed views.
Precomputed Views
To give fast and consistent answers to queries on huge amounts of data, precomputed views are prepared both in the batch layer and in the speed layer. In the batch layer, these are constructed by applying a batch function to all the data. This leads to a transformation of the data into a more compact form suitable for answering a pre-defined set of queries. This idea is essentially the same as what is done in data warehousing.
Layers of Lambda
The Lambda Architecture solves the problem of computing
arbitrary functions on arbitrary data in real-time by decomposing the problem
into three layers,
Batch Layer or Cold Path
Speed Layer or Hot path
Serving Layer
Batch layer or Cold path
The nub of the λ is the master dataset. The master dataset is the source of truth in Lambda Architecture. The Master dataset must hold the following three properties,
Data is raw.
Data is immutable.
Data is eternally true.
This gives the Lambda architecture ability to reconstruct the application from the master data even if the whole serving layer data set is lost. The batch layer pre-computes results using a distributed processing system that can handle very large quantities of data. The batch layer aims at perfect accuracy by being able to process all available data when generating views.
The batch layer prefers re-computation
algorithms over incremental algorithms. The problem with incremental algorithms
is the failure to address the challenges faced by human mistakes. The
re-computational nature of the batch layer creates simple batch views as the
complexity is addressed during precomputation. Additionally, the responsibility
of the batch layer is to historically process the data with high accuracy.
Machine learning algorithms take time to train the model and give better
results over time. Such naturally exhaustive and time-consuming tasks are
processed inside the batch layer.
The problem with the batch layer is high latency. The batch
jobs must be run over the entire master dataset. These jobs can process data
that can be relatively old as they cannot keep up with the inflow of stream
data. This is a serious limitation for real-time data processing. To overcome
this limitation, the speed layer is very significant.
Frameworks and solutions such as Hadoop MapReduce, Spark core, Spark SQL, GraphX, and MLLib are the widely adopted big-data tools using batch mode. Batch schedulers include Apache Oozie, Spring Batch, and Unix crontab which, invoke the processing at a periodic interval.
Speed layer or Streaming layer or Hot path
The real-time data processing is realized in the speed
layer. The speed layer achieves up-to-date query results and compensates for
the high latency of the batch layer.
To create real-time views of the most recent data, this layer sacrifices throughput and decreases latency substantially. The real-time views are generated immediately after the data is received but are not as complete or precise as the batch layer. In contrast to the re-computation approach of the batch layer, the speed layer adopts incremental computational algorithms. Since the data is not complete i.e less data so less computation. The incremental computation is more complex, but the data handled in the speed layer is vastly smaller and the views are transient.
Most operations on streams are windowed operations operating on slices of time such as moving averages for the stock process every hour, top products sold this week, fraud attempts in banking, etc. Popular choices for stream-processing tools include Apache Kafka, Apache Flume, Apache Storm, Spark Streaming, Apache Flink, Amazon Kinesis, etc.
Serving Layer
The output from both the batch and speed layers are stored in the serving layer.pre-computed batch views are indexed in this layer for faster retrieval. All the on-demand queries from the reporting or presentation layer are served by merging the batch and real-time views and outputs a result.
The batch views for a serving layer are
produced from scratch. When a new version of a view becomes available, it must
be possible to completely swap out the older version with the updated view.
Scalable
A serving layer database must be capable of
handling views of arbitrary size. As with the distributed filesystems and batch
computation framework previously discussed, this requires it to be distributed
across multiple machines.
Random
reads
A serving layer database must support
random reads, with indexes providing direct access to small portions of the
view. This requirement is necessary to have low latency on queries.
Fault-tolerant
Because a serving layer database is
distributed, it must be tolerant of machine failures.
This is how Lambda Architecture λ handles humongous amounts of data with low latency queries in a fault-tolerant manner. Let’s see the various implementation of lambda architecture and its applications in the next part.
To be continued…
About the Author:
Bargunan is a Big Data Engineer and a programming enthusiast. His passion is to share his knowledge by writing his experiences about them. He believes “Gaining knowledge is the first step to wisdom and sharing it is the first step to humanity.”
Artificial Intelligence for IT operations or AIOps has exploded over the past few years. As more and more enterprises set about their digital transformation journeys, AIOps becomes imperative to keep their businesses running smoothly.
AIOps uses several technologies like
Machine Learning and Big Data to automate the identification and resolution of
common Information Technology (IT) problems. The systems, services, and
applications in a large enterprise produce volumes of log and performance data.
AIOps uses this data to monitor the assets and gain visibility into the
behaviour and dependencies among these assets.
According to a Gartner publication,
the adoption of AIOps by large enterprises would rise to 30% by 2023.
ZIF – The ideal AIOps platform of choice
Zero Incident FrameworkTM
(ZIF) is an AIOps based TechOps platform that enables proactive detection and
remediation of incidents helping organizations drive towards a Zero Incident
Enterprise™.
ZIF comprises of 5 modules, as
outlined below.
At the heart of ZIF, lies its Analyze and Predict (A&P) modules
which are powered by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning techniques.
From the business perspective, the primary goal of A&P would be 100%
availability of applications and business processes.
Let us understand more about thePredict module
of ZIF.
Predictive Analytics is one of the main USP of
the ZIF platform. ZIF encompassesSupervised, Unsupervised and Reinforcement
Learning algorithms for realization of various business use cases (as shown
below).
How does the Predict Module of ZIF work?
Through its data ingestion capabilities, the ZIF
platform can receive and process all types of data (both structured and
unstructured) from various tools in the enterprise. The types of data can be
related to alerts, events, logs, performance of devices, relations of devices,
workload topologies, network topologies etc. By analyzing all these data, the platform
predicts the anomalies that can occur in the environment. These anomalies get
presented as ‘Opportunity Cards’ so that suitable action can be taken ahead
of time to eliminate any undesired incidents from occurring. Since this is ‘Proactive’
and not ‘Reactive’, it brings about a paradigm shift to any organization’s
endeavour to achieve 100% availability of their enterprise systems and
platforms. Predictions are done at multiple levels – application level,
business process level, device level etc.
Sub-functions of Prediction Module
How does the Predict module manifest to enterprise users of the platform?
Predict module categorizes the opportunity
cards into three swim lanes.
Warning
swim lane – Opportunity Cards that have an “Expected
Time of Impact” (ETI) beyond 60 minutes.
Critical
swim lane – Opportunity Cards that have an ETI within
60 minutes.
Processed
/ Lost– Opportunity Cards that have been processed
or lost without taking any action.
Few of the enterprises that realized the power of ZIF’s Prediction Module
A manufacturing giant in the US
A large non-profit mental
health and social service provider in New York
Vasu heads Engineering function for A&P. He is a Digital Transformation leader with ~20 years of IT industry experience spanning across Product Engineering, Portfolio Delivery, Large Program Management etc. Vasu has designed and delivered Open Systems, Core Banking, Web / Mobile Applications etc.
Outside of his professional role, Vasu enjoys playing badminton and focusses on fitness routines.
“Uber, the world’s largest taxi
company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner,
creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory.
Netflix, the world’s largest movie house, own no cinemas. And Airbnb, the
world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something
interesting is happening.”
– Tom Goodwin, an executive at the French media group Havas.
This new breed of companies is the
fastest growing in history because they own the customer interface layer. It is
the platform where all the value and profit is. “Platform business” is a
more wholesome termfor this model for which data is the fuel; Big Data & AI/ML
technologies are the harbinger of new waves of productivity growth and
innovation.
With Big data and AI/ML is making a
big difference in the area of public health, let’s see how it is helping us
tackle the global emergency of coronavirus formally known as COVID-19.
“With rapidly spreading disease, a
two-week lag is an eternity.”
DISCOVERING/ DETECTING
Chinese
technology giant Alibaba has developed an AI system for detecting the COVID-19
in CT scans of patients’ chests with 96% accuracy against viral
pneumonia cases. It only takes 20 seconds for the AI to decide, whereas humans
generally take about 15 minutes to diagnose the illness as there can be upwards
of 300 images to evaluate.The system was trained on images and data from
5,000 confirmed coronavirus cases and has been tested in hospitals throughout
China. Per a report, at least 100 healthcare facilities are currently employing
Alibaba’s AI to detect COVID-19.
Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd (Ping An) aims to
address the issue of lack of radiologists by introducing the COVID-19 smart
image-reading system. This image-reading system can read the huge volumes of CT
scans in epidemic areas.
Ping
An Smart Healthcare uses clinical data to train the AI model of the COVID-19
smart image-reading system. The AI analysis engine conducts a comparative
analysis of multiple CT scan images of the same patient and measures the
changes in lesions. It helps in tracking the development of the disease,
evaluation of the treatment and in prognosis of patients.Ultimately it assists
doctors to diagnose, triage and evaluate COVID-19 patients swiftly and
effectively.
Ping
An Smart Healthcare’s COVID-19 smart image-reading system also supports AI
image-reading remotely by medical professionals outside the epidemic
areas.Since its launch, the smart image-reading system has provided services to
more than 1,500 medical institutions. More than 5,000 patients have received
smart image-reading services for free.
The
more solutions the better. At least when it comes to helping overwhelmed
doctors provide better diagnoses and, thus, better outcomes.
MONITORING
AI
based Temperature monitoring & scanning
In
Beijing, China, subway passengers are being screened for symptoms of
coronavirus, but not by health authorities. Instead, artificial intelligence is
in-charge.
Two
Chinese AI giants, Megvii and Baidu, have introduced temperature-scanning. They
have implemented scanners to detect body temperature and send alerts to company
workers if a person’s body temperature is high enough to constitute a fever.
Megvii’s
AI system detects body temperatures for up to 15 people per second andup to 16
feet. It monitors as many as 16 checkpoints in a single station. The system
integrates body detection, face detection, and dual sensing via infrared
cameras and visible light. The system can accurately detect and flag high body
temperature even when people are wearing masks, hats, or covering their faces
with other items. Megvii’s system also sends alerts to an on-site staff member.
Baidu,
one of the largest search-engine companies in China, screens subway passengers
at the Qinghe station with infrared scanners. It also uses a facial-recognition
system, taking photographs of passengers’ faces. If the Baidu system detects a body
temperature of at least 99-degrees Fahrenheit, it sends an alert to the staff
member for another screening. The technology can scan the temperatures of more
than 200 people per minute.
AI
based Social Media Monitoring
An international team is using machine learning to scour
through social media posts, news reports, data from official public health
channels, and information supplied by doctors for warning signs of the virus
across geographies.The program is looking for social media posts that mention
specific symptoms, like respiratory problems and fever, from a geographic area
where doctors have reported potential cases. Natural language processing is
used to parse the text posted on social media, for example, to distinguish
between someone discussing the news and someone complaining about how they
feel.
The approach has proven capable of spotting a coronavirus
needle in a haystack of big data. This technique could help experts learn how
the virus behaves. It may be possible to determine the age, gender, and location
of those most at risk quicker than using official medical sources.
PREDICTING
Data from hospitals, airports, and other public locations are
being used to predict disease spread and risk. Hospitals can also use the data
to plan for the impact of an outbreak on their operations.
Kalman Filter
Kalman filter was pioneered by Rudolf Emil Kalman in 1960,
originally designed and developed to solve the navigation problem in the Apollo
Project. Since then, it has been applied to numerous cases such as guidance,
navigation, and control of vehicles, computer vision’s object tracking,
trajectory optimization, time series analysis in signal processing,
econometrics and more.
Kalman filter is a recursive algorithm which uses time-series
measurement over time, containing statistical noise and produce estimations of
unknown variables.
For the one-day prediction Kalman filter can be used, while for
the long-term forecast a linear model is used where its main features are
Kalman predictors, infected rate relative to population, time-depended
features, and weather history and forecasting.
The one-day Kalman prediction is very accurate and powerful while
a longer period prediction is more challenging but provides a future trend.Long
term prediction does not guarantee full accuracy but provides a fair estimation
following the recent trend. The model should re-run daily to gain better
results.
The Center for Systems Science and
Engineering at Johns Hopkins University has developed an interactive, web-based
dashboard that tracks the status of COVID-19 around the world. The resource
provides a visualization of the location and number of confirmed COVID-19
cases, deaths and recoveries for all affected countries.
The primary data source for the
tool is DXY, a Chinese platform that aggregates local media and government
reports to provide COVID-19 cumulative case totals in near real-time at the
province level in China and country level otherwise. Additional data comes from
Twitter feeds, online news services and direct communication sent through the
dashboard. Johns Hopkins then confirms the case numbers with regional and local
health departments. This kind of Data analytics platform plays a pivotal role
in addressing the coronavirus outbreak.
All data from the dashboard is also
freely available in the following GitHub repository.
One of AI’s core strengths when
working on identifying and limiting the effects of virus outbreaks is its
incredibly insistent nature. AIsystems never tire, can sift through enormous
amounts of data, and identify
possible correlations and causations that humans can’t.
However, there are
limits to AI’s ability to both identify virus outbreaks and predict how
they will spread. Perhaps the best-known example comes from the neighboring
field of big data analytics. At its launch, Google Flu
Trends was heralded as a great leap forward in relation to
identifying and estimating the spread of the flu—until it underestimated the
2013 flu season by a whopping 140 percent and was quietly put to rest.Poor data
quality was identified as one of the main reasons Google Flu Trends
failed. Unreliable or faulty data can wreak havoc on the prediction
power of AI.
Bargunan is a Big Data Engineer and a programming enthusiast. His passion is to share his knowledge by writing his experiences about them. He believes “Gaining knowledge is the first step to wisdom and sharing it is the first step to humanity.”
Reinforcement learning (RL) is an area of Machine Learning (ML) that takes suitable actions to maximize rewards situations. The goal of reinforcement learning algorithms is to find the best possible action to take in a specific situation. Just like the human brain, it is rewarded for good choices and penalized for bad choices and learns from each choice. RL tries to mimic the way that humans learn new things, not from a teacher but via interaction with the environment. At the end, the RL learns to achieve a goal in an uncertain, potentially complex environment.
Understanding Reinforcement Learning
How does one learn cycling? How does a baby learn to walk? How do we become better at doing something with more practice? Let us explore learning to cycle to illustrate the idea behind RL.
Did somebody tell you how to cycle or gave you steps to follow? Or did you learn it by spending hours watching videos of people cycling? All these will surely give you an idea about cycling; but will it be enough to actually get you cycling? The answer is no. You learn to cycle only by cycling (action). Through trials and errors (practice), and going through all the positive experiences (positive reward) and negative experiences (negative rewards or punishments), before getting your balance and control right (maximum reward or best outcome). This analogy of how our brain learns cycling applies to reinforcement learning. Through trials, errors, and rewards, it finds the best course of action.
Components of Reinforcement Learning
The major components of RL are as detailed below:
Agent: Agent is the part of RL which takes actions, receives rewards for actions and gets a new environment state as a result of the action taken. In the cycling analogy, the agent is a human brain that decides what action to take and gets rewarded (falling is negative and riding is positive).
Environment: The environment represents the outside world (only relevant part of the world which the agent needs to know about to take actions) that interacts with agents. In the cycling analogy, the environment is the cycling track and the objects as seen by the rider.
State: State is the condition or position in which the agent is currently exhibiting or residing. In the cycling analogy, it will be the speed of cycle, tilting of the handle, tilting of the cycle, etc.
Action: What the agent does while interacting with the environment is referred to as action. In the cycling analogy, it will be to peddle harder (if the decision is to increase speed), apply brakes (if the decision is to reduce speed), tilt handle, tilt body, etc.
Rewards: Reward is an indicator to the agent on how good or bad the action taken was. In the cycling analogy, it can be +1 for not falling, -10 for hitting obstacles and -100 for falling, the reward for outcomes (+1, -10, -100) are defined while building the RL agent. Since the agent wants to maximize rewards, it avoids hitting and always tries to avoid falling.
Characteristics of Reinforcement Learning
Instead of simply scanning the datasets to find a mathematical equation that can reproduce historical outcomes like other Machine Learning techniques, reinforcement learning is focused on discovering the optimal actions that will lead to the desired outcome.
There are no supervisors to guide the model on how well it is doing. The RL agent gets a scalar reward and tries to figure out how good the action was.
Feedback is delayed. The agent gets an instant reward for action, however, the long-term effect of an action is known only later. Just like a move in chess may seem good at the time it is made, but may turn out to be a bad long term move as the game progress.
Time matters (sequential). People who are familiar with supervised and unsupervised learning will know that the sequence in which data is used for training does not matter for the outcome. However, for RL, since action and reward at current state influence future state and action, the time and sequence of data matters.
Action affects subsequent data RL agent receives.
Why Reinforcement Learning
The type of problems that reinforcement learning solves are simply beyond human capabilities. They are even beyond the solving capabilities of ML techniques. Besides, RL eliminates the need for data to learn, as the agent learns by interacting with the environment. This is a great advantage to solve problems where data availability or data collection is an issue.
Reinforcement Learning applications
RL is the darling of ML researchers now. It is advancing with incredible pace, to solve business and industrial problems and garnering a lot of attention due to its potential. Going forward, RL will be core to organizations’ AI strategies.
Reinforcement Learning at GAVS
Reinforcement Learning is core to GAVS’ AI strategy and is being actively pursued to power the IP led AIOps platform – Zero Incident FrameworkTM (ZIF). We had our first success on RL; developing an RL agent for automated log rotation in servers.
References:
Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction second edition by Richard S. Sutton and Andrew G. Barto
Gireesh is a part of the projects run in collaboration with IIT Madras for developing AI solutions and algorithms. His interest includes Data Science, Machine Learning, Financial markets, and Geo-politics. He believes that he is competing against himself to become better than who he was yesterday. He aspires to become a well-recognized subject matter expert in the field of Artificial Intelligence.
The Healthcare Industry is going through a quiet revolution. Factors like disease trends, doctor demographics, regulatory policies, environment, technology etc. are forcing the industry to turn to emerging technologies like AI, to help adapt to the pace of change. Here, we take a look at some key use cases of AI in Healthcare.
Medical Imaging
The application of Machine Learning (ML) in Medical Imaging is showing highly encouraging results. ML is a subset of AI, where algorithms and models are used to help machines imitate the cognitive functions of the human brain and to also self-learn from their experiences.
AI can be gainfully used in the different stages of medical imaging- in acquisition, image reconstruction, processing, interpretation, storage, data mining & beyond. The performance of ML computational models improves tremendously as they get exposed to more & more data and this foundation on colossal amounts of data enables them to gradually better humans at interpretation. They begin to detect anomalies not perceptible to the human eye & not discernible to the human brain!
What goes hand-in-hand with data, is noise. Noise creates artifacts in images and reduces its quality, leading to inaccurate diagnosis. AI systems work through the clutter and aid noise- reduction leading to better precision in diagnosis, prognosis, staging, segmentation and treatment.
At the forefront of this use case is Radio genomics- correlating cancer imaging features and gene expression. Needless to say, this will play a pivotal role in cancer research.
Drug Discovery
Drug Discovery is an arduous process that takes several years from the start of research to obtaining approval to market. Research involves laboring through copious amounts of medical literature to identify the dynamics between genes, molecular targets, pathways, candidate compounds. Sifting through all of this complex data to arrive at conclusions is an enormous challenge. When this voluminous data is fed to the ML computational models, relationships are reliably established. AI powered by domain knowledge is slashing down time & cost involved in new drug development.
Cybersecurity in Healthcare
Data security is of paramount importance to Healthcare providers who need to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability of patient data. With cyberattacks increasing in number and complexity, these formidable threats are giving security teams sleepless nights! The main strength of AI is its ability to curate massive quantities of data- here threat intelligence, nullify the noise, provide instant insights & self-learn in the process. Predictive & Prescriptive capabilities of these computational models drastically reduces response time.
Virtual Health assistants
Virtual Health assistants like Chatbots, give patients 24/7 access to critical information, in addition to offering services like scheduling health check-ups or setting up appointments. AI- based platforms for wearable health devices and health apps come armed with loads of features to monitor health signs, daily activities, diet, sleep patterns etc. and provide alerts for immediate action or suggest personalized plans to enable healthy lifestyles.
AI for Healthcare IT Infrastructure
Healthcare IT Infrastructure running critical applications that enable patient care, is the heart of a Healthcare provider. With dynamically changing IT landscapes that are distributed, hybrid & on-demand, IT Operations teams are finding it hard to keep up. Artificial Intelligence for IT Ops (AIOps) is poised to fundamentally transform the Healthcare Industry. It is powering Healthcare Providers across the globe, who are adopting it to Automate, Predict, Remediate & Prevent Incidents in their IT Infrastructure. GAVS’ Zero Incident FrameworkTM (ZIF) – an AIOps Platform, is a pure-play AI platform based on unsupervised Machine Learning and comes with the full suite of tools an IT Infrastructure team would need. Please watch this video to learn more.
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