Happy New Year future self!

I hope this year is a bit better than the last 3 years we’ve had lately; I always like to embrace the future with positivism and energy, and I cannot think of a better way to do so than spending some time on OSBDET and coming up with a new release for the New Year.

OSBDET 2023 Release 1 is ready to be used and I hope my current and former students can enjoy it playing around with Big Data technologies as much I enjoy keeping this project alive. For those who it’s the first time hearing about the OSBDET project, the following bullet points will rapidly get you up to speed:

• It’s a set of scripts helping you download and configure Big Data Open Source frameworks and tools in one single machine.
• I use it to build a course environment (virtual machine) for my students in minutes.
• It’s motivated after spending many days building a course environment back in time (Building an analytics and multi data-set OVA for learners) and realizing that I’d have to spend the same amount of time every time I wanted to build a new one.
• Not all my students have a strong technical background, therefore relying on complex commercial products is not an option; OSBDET rely on the same technologies used in commercial products but in a very simplified manner, which facilitates their study.

Additionally to the scripts available in the OSBDET Github repo, I usually build a couple of virtual machines (based on Debian 11) for my students to make their life easier:

• OSBDET’23r1.ova (8.7GB) – a Virtual Box compatible Virtual Machine ready to be used on Intel processor based laptops (Windows and Mac OS mainly); it’s been tested on Virtual Box 7.0.4 on an Intel processor based Mac OS laptop running Ventura 13.1.
• OSBDET’23r1.utm.zip (8GB) – a UTM compatible Virtual Machine ready to be used on Apple Silicon processor based laptops (Mac OS only); it’s been tested on UTM 4.0.9 on an Apple Silicon (M1) processor based Mac OS laptop running Ventura 13.1

There have been two main improvements for this release:

1. Some of the frameworks have been updated to new releases compatible with the labs for my courses (ex. Kafka 3.3.1 with KRaft, NiFi 1.19.1, Spark 3.2.3, …)
2. It adds a NGINX web server serving a static website describing the contents of the course environment and how to use them; this was a request from a former student 2 years back and here it is 🙂 the web server is bound to the URL http://localhost:2023 (next year will be 2024 and so on and so forth; how creative that is! :p)
   
   
   
   

And finally a quick recording going over the installation and first steps with OSBDET 2023 Release 1:

All the best!

Raúl