Q&A Sessions: Three Trends and Tools to Follow as 2017 Approaches

As 2017 approaches, it's clear that cloud computing and Big Data analytics are huge themes, and open source technologies are helping to drive these trends. However, a whole lot of enabing technologies and corollary trends are arriving as well.

Recently, we've done some interviews with leaders on the open source scene who can speak to these corollary trends. In case you missed them, in this post, you can find your way to three of our Q&A sessions not to miss.

Meet the API Economy. How important are APIs in today’s digitally driven economy? They’re plenty important, and Paul Doscher (seen here), CEO of Restlet, has put some metrics on the concept.

Restlet offers a comprehensive and integrated set of capabilities to design, develop and deploy APIs, including doing so in the cloud, easily and hassle-free. We caught up with Doscher, who identifies himself as “old surfer dude” in addition to CEO, for a guest post on the state of the API economy. Here are his thoughts.

Big Data Drives Data Science. Databricks, a company founded by the creators of the popular open-source Big Data processing engine Apache Spark, has gained much momentum as Spark has gathered big backers and widespread development. Spark is one of the most active open source projects in the Big Data ecosystem, and there are increasing efforts among data scientists to leverage it and other open source tools.

We caught up with Kavitha Mariappan (shown here), who is Vice President of Marketing at Databricks, for a guest post on how open source tools are driving data science in brand new ways. Find it here.

The Grappa Team. One of the most interesting new tools in data analytics is the open source Grappa project, which scales data-intensive applications on commodity clusters and offers a new type of abstraction that can beat classic distributed shared memory (DSM) systems. In fact, Rich Wolski, founder of the Eucalyptus cloud project, enthusiastically pointed to Grappa as a very interesting project in our recent interview with him. We caught up with some of the leaders behind Grappa, who are based at the University of Washington, for an interview found here.