The Download: Tech Talks by HPCC Systems – An Interview with Lorraine Chapman

Welcome to the eighth installment of the summer series of The Download: Tech Talks by HPCC Systems

This series focuses on information about the latest developments within HPCC Systems related to the cloud. HPCC Systems has been very active with projects over the past few months, getting better support for dynamic environments via container orchestration and other capabilities.

The eighth installment of the summer series of The Download: Tech Talks by HPCC Systems, features an interview with Lorraine Chapman (LexisNexis Risk Solutions), and Flavio Villanustre (VP and Chief Security Officer, LexisNexis Risk Solutions).

The full video recording of Flavio and Lorraine’s interview, “The Download Tech Talks by HPCC Systems  An Interview with Lorraine Chapman,” is available on the HPCC Systems YouTube channel, under 2020 Tech Talks.

The audio version is available on Soundcloud.

HPCC Systems · The Download  Tech Talks By HPCC Systems An Inteview With Lorraine Chapman

Meet our presenters

Flavio Villanustre is CISO and VP of Technology for LexisNexis® Risk Solutions. He also leads the open source HPCC Systems platform initiative, which is focused on expanding the community gathering around the HPCC Systems Big Data platform, originally developed by LexisNexis Risk Solutions in 2001 and later released under an open source license in 2011. Flavio’s expertise covers a broad range of subjects, including hardware and systems, software engineering, and data analytics and machine learning. He has been involved with open source software for more than two decades, founding the first Linux users’ group in Buenos Aires in 1994. 

Lorraine Chapman is a Consulting Business Analyst for LexisNexis® Risk Solutions.  She has worked alongside software developers for over 20 years in a supportive role which has ranged from producing documentation including developing on-line help systems to software testing and release management. Lorraine also manages the HPCC Systems Intern Program. She is also an active blogger on our website covering a wide range of subjects from new release information, features and improvements and the work students have completed during their internships.

This blog provides a brief summary of topics discussed in the interview, including:

• Latest Developments
• Current Projects
• Additional Information

Let’s begin by discussing the latest developments in the HPCC Systems “journey to the Cloud.”

Latest Developments

The HPCC Systems Development team developed basic capabilities for a cloud-native platform with Kubernetes integration. The operating environment for this platform consists of Docker containers managed by Kubernetes. These containers are currently deployed by Helm charts on cloud platforms, such as Azure (AKS), Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud.

Other Open Source deployment and management tools, such as Terraform, are being explored for future use. There is also continued support for “bare metal” installations.

The latest version of the HPCC Systems “cloud native platform” is available for download  on the website. Version 8.0, which is the “production” version,” will be released in 2021. 

Now, let’s take a look at current projects.

Current Projects

This year’s summer interns are working on multiple projects that involve testing the HPCC Systems cloud-native platform on various cloud platforms, and projects that involve machine learning. Stay tuned for blogs about these projects.

One of the cloud-native platform projects involves tracking cost associated with data and the amount of storage that is needed. For this project, the intern sets up HPCC Systems clusters on Microsoft Azure Cloud with different configurations, in various regions. Amongst other things, it was discovered that firing up a similar cluster in a different region can have cost implications.

Some interns have been working on machine learning projects using the Bare Metal platform. A number of them will be moving on to run their queries using our cloud-native platform to compare performance and the results generated. These comparative studies may provide the team with some valuable insights and contribute to the ongoing development of our Cloud Native platform.

The development team is currently working on providing an easy way to get data onto clusters in our cloud native environment and the provision of Azure Blob Storage, which provides scalable object storage in the Cloud. Both these features are targeted for our HPCC Systems 7.12.0 release coming in the next few months.

Additional Information

For additional information about the HPCC Systems cloud development project click here.

View the HPCC Systems Roadmap.

Acknowledgements

A special thank you to Lorraine Chapman and Flavio Villanustre for this informative update about the HPCC Systems cloud development project.