IT for Business Analytics

Patrick Anderson

Homework 3

Questions have equal grade points

Briefly means 4-5 sentences of your own not copy and paste

Screenshots need to show the answer and your account name/username clearly

1. What is a data lake? How is it different than data warehouses? Briefly explain.
A data lake and a data warehouse are both used for storing big data. However, data lakes are vast
pools of raw data and data warehouses are repositories for structured, filtered data that has 
already been processed for a specific purpose. For data lakes, the purpose of data is not 
determined, whereas the purpose of data for data warehouses is currently in use. Another 
difference between the two is that users for data lakes consist of data scientists whereas data 
warehouses consist of business professionals. 

2. What are the pros and cons of serverless architecture? Why does AWS call their service 
Lambda? What do Google and Microsoft call their serverless architecture in their cloud services?
Some of the pros of using serverless architecture include low pricing (low operational and 
development costs), reduced maintenance (such as updates, patches and hackers), scalability, 
(allows application to scale automatically as user base grows), and that it allows users to set up 
various environments that are much easier than traditional processes. Although, there are some 
limitations when using serverless architecture, such as the steep learning curve, so professional 
experience might be necessary. Also, it isn’t ideal for long­term tasks as it only gives users a 
short amount of time to complete them. Long duration operations such as uploading videos 
might require additional functions. Also, the application is completely dependent on a third­party
provider so users technically wont have full control over their application. AWS Lambda lets 
you run code without provisioning or managing servers. Lambda runs when triggered by an 
event and executes code that’s been loaded into the system. Google also offers servless 
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computing with their service called “Google Cloud Functions”. In addition, Microsoft developed 
a servless cloud platform that offers similar features called “Azure Functions”. 

3. Do the exercise in class notes section 3.2.1. Provide 2 screenshots:

a. Your S3 console, a file in your bucket (similar to 2:20 of the video)
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b. Your terminal after downloading the file from your bucket to your EC2 using
the CLI (similar to 10:10 of the video)
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4. Do the exercise in class notes section 3.4.1. Provide 2 screenshots:

a. Your terminal after writing tweets to your EC2, showing the data_file.json
(similar to 5:46 of the video)
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b. Your S3 bucket with uploaded tweets (similar to 7:15 of the video)