Reference Architecture and Classification of Technologies, Products and Services for Big Data Systems

Many business cases exploiting big data have been realised in recent years; Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook are examples of companies in the social networking domain. Other big data use cases have focused on capturing of value from streaming of movies (Netflix), monitoring of network traffic, or improvement of processes in the manufacturing industry. Also, implementation architectures of the use cases have been published. However, conceptual work integrating the approaches into one coherent reference architecture has been limited. The contribution of this paper is technology independent reference architecture for big data systems, which is based on analysis of published implementation architectures of big data use cases. An additional contribution is classification of related implementation technologies and products/services, which is based on analysis of the published use cases and survey of related work. The reference architecture and associated classification are aimed for facilitating architecture design and selection of technologies or commercial solutions, when constructing big data systems.