Microsoft's Azure Machine Learning is and end-to-end data science and analytics solution that helps professional data scientists to prepare data, develop experiments, and deploy models in the cloud. It replaces the Azure Machine Learning Workbench.
Well suited: To most of the local run of datasets and non-prod systems - scalability is not a problem at all. Including data from multiple types of data sources is an added advantage. MLlib is a decently nice built-in library that can be used for most of the ML tasks. Less appropriate: We had to work on a RecSys where the music dataset that we used was around 300+Gb in size. We faced memory-based issues. Few times we also got memory errors. Also the MLlib library does not have support for advanced analytics and deep-learning frameworks support. Understanding the internals of the working of Apache Spark for beginners is highly not possible.
User friendliness: This is by far the most user friendly tool I've seen in analytics. You don't need to know how to code at all! Just create a few blocks, connect a few lines and you are capable of running a boosted decision tree with a very high R squared!
Speed: Azure ML is a cloud based tool, so processing is not made with your computer, making the reliability and speed top notch!
Cost: If you don't know how to code, this is by far the cheapest machine learning tool out there. I believe it costs less than $15/month. If you know how to code, then R is free.
Connectivity: It is super easy to embed R or Python codes on Azure ML. So if you want to do more advanced stuff, or use a model that is not yet available on Azure ML, you can simply paste the code on R or Python there!
Microsoft environment: Many many companies rely on the Microsoft suite. And Azure ML connects perfectly with Excel, CSV and Access files.
If the team looking to use Apache Spark is not used to debug and tweak settings for jobs to ensure maximum optimizations, it can be frustrating. However, the documentation and the support of the community on the internet can help resolve most issues. Moreover, it is highly configurable and it integrates with different tools (eg: it can be used by dbt core), which increase the scenarios where it can be used
1. It integrates very well with scala or python. 2. It's very easy to understand SQL interoperability. 3. Apache is way faster than the other competitive technologies. 4. The support from the Apache community is very huge for Spark. 5. Execution times are faster as compared to others. 6. There are a large number of forums available for Apache Spark. 7. The code availability for Apache Spark is simpler and easy to gain access to. 8. Many organizations use Apache Spark, so many solutions are available for existing applications.
Spark in comparison to similar technologies ends up being a one stop shop. You can achieve so much with this one framework instead of having to stitch and weave multiple technologies from the Hadoop stack, all while getting incredibility performance, minimal boilerplate, and getting the ability to write your application in the language of your choosing.
It is easier to learn, it has a very cost effective license for use, it has native build and created for Azure cloud services, and that makes it perfect when compared against the alternatives. As a Microsoft tool, it has been built to contain many visual features and improved usability even for non-specialist users.
Productivity: Instead of coding and recoding, Azure ML helped my organization to get to meaningful results faster;
Cost: Azure ML can save hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars for an organization, since the license costs around $15/month per seat.
Focus on insights and not on statistics: Since running a model is so easy, analysts can focus more on recommendations and insights, rather than statistical details
