Data Just Right: Introduction to Large-Scale Data & Analytics

11. Using R with Large Datasets

The sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians.

—Hal Varian

The role of traditional systems administrators is changing. Before the growth of cloud-computing platforms and distributed data frameworks, sys admins were primarily concerned with maintaining server hardware. There is still a need for this type of work, but thanks to hardware virtualization, companies are beginning to build products that are managed and hosted in the cloud. Companies are purchasing compute time on clusters of virtual machines. The underlying hardware that supports these clusters is abstracted away from the customer. As the tooling around scalable data analysis becomes more mature, applications that process large amounts of data ...