Over the past 5 - 7 years, organizations have gradually shifted their resources to cloud-based platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Engine. Today, all of these contain extremely sophisticated and extensive architecture to support machine learning, data mining, and in general data science at an enterprise level to meet the needs of organizations of all sizes.

In addition, the concept of images, such as AMI images in Amazon's AWS, allows users to initiate a pre-built snapshot of an OS with pre-installed components. As a result, users can almost entirely avoid the setup overhead prior to trying out new platforms.

Hadoop and map-reduce operations in general are also supported extensively in AWS. The EMR, or Elastic Map Reduce in AWS, and HDInsight in Azure, are two well-known and very popular Big Data frameworks.

The tutorial at the end of this chapter will demonstrate how to set up an AWS account and start using a sample AMI Image.