In a promising sign for the future of Big Data Analytics, Internet giant Amazon is now offering a hosted version of the R programming language.
R is a programming language that is mainly used for statistical analysis. Although it has been around since the 1990s, it has recently become popular for its use in Big Data mining and analysis. Amazon is offering 'Revolution R Enterprise 7' (RRE) on its cloud service, which is a commercialized version of the R language developed by Revolution Analytics. RRE will run on either Windows or Linux platforms.
While R itself is free and open source, Revolution Analytics claims that its service offers "higher performance and higher scalability for dealing with large data sets". There is also a version of RRE that will run on multiple processors simultaneously. However, this service doesn't come cheap - the base rate for RRE starts at 1.25 per hour per core.
Personally, it is difficult to see the added value of this service. While there is a certain level of convenience by using this on demand service, not to mention the knowledgeable tech support that Revolution provides, the appeal for this product is limited at best. Revolution themselves acknowledges this by saying that it would be more cost effective to buy their product outright for any data set exceeding 1TB.
In essence, this service offers a convenient way for more people to get in on the Big Data trend and test out the R programming language, but faster and more cost effective alternatives will likely arise with the increasing popularity of the R language and Big Data Analytics in general.
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