Building and Operating a Large-Scale Enterprise Data Analytics Platform

Over the last three years we have been running a large-scale data processing platform for applying analytics to corporate data at scale on an OpenStack private cloud instance. Our platform makes a wide variety of corporate data assets, such as sales, marketing, customer information, as well as data from less conventional sources such as weather, news and social media available for analytics purposes to hundreds of globally distributed teams across the company. We control every layer in the stack from the processing engines down to the hardware. Here we report our experiences in building and operating such a system. We describe our technical choices and describe how they evolved as we observed the actual workloads created by users.