Machine learning in the cloud forces hard big data decisions

A growing crop of cloud platforms are targeting machine learning users with applications and services that can serve as an alternative to complicated and disparate open source tools. Some say there's cause for caution in evaluating these tools, however. "We're seeing a really massive shift of big data into the public cloud," said Brian Hopkins, an analyst at Forrester Research. "Companies that jumped on Hadoop early are now facing upgrades; companies are challenged to maintain multiple versions of Spark. In the midst of all this expensive on-premises big data, you can get in the cloud in a week or so."