Following are some of the most popular data visualization platforms, which help you to prepare reports with data visualization as per your business requirements:

• Amazon QuickSight is a cloud-based BI tool for enterprise-grade data visualizations. It comes with a variety of visualization graph presets such as a line graphs, pie charts, treemaps, heat maps, histograms, and so on. Amazon QuickSight has a data-caching engine known as Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine (SPICE), which helps to render visualizations quickly. You can also perform data preparation tasks such as renaming and removing fields, changing data types, and creating new calculated fields. QuickSight also provides ML-based visualization insights and other ML-based features such as auto forecast predictions.

• Kibana is an open source data visualization tool used for stream data visualization and log exploration. Kibana offers close integration with Elasticsearch and uses it as a default option to search for data on top of the Elasticsearch service. Like other BI tools, Kibana also provides popular visualization charts such as histograms, pie charts, and heat maps, and offers built-in geospatial support.
• Tableau is one of the most popular BI tools for data visualization. It uses a visual query engine, which is a purpose-built engine, used to analyze big data faster than traditional queries. Tableau offers a drag and drop interface and the ability to blend data from multiple resources.
• Spotfire uses in-memory processing for faster response times, which enables an analysis of extensive datasets from a variety of resources. It provides the ability to plot your data on a geographical map and share it on Twitter. With Spotfire recommendations, it inspects your data automatically and makes suggestions about how to best visualize it.
• Jaspersoft enables self-service reporting and analysis. It also offers drag and drop designer capability.
• PowerBI is a popular BI tool provided by Microsoft. It provides self-service analytics with a variety of visualization choices.

Data visualization is an essential and massive topic for solution architects. As a solution architect, you need to be aware of the various tools available and make the right choice as per your business requirements for data visualization. This section provided a very high-level overview of popular data visualization tools.

As internet connectivity is increasing, there are small devices everywhere with small memory and compute capacities. These devices connect various physical entities and there is a need to collect and analyze data from millions of these connected devices. For example, weather data collected from various sensors can be utilized to forecast weather for wind energy and farming. Let's cover some more details about IoT, which is the growing global network of small interconnected devices.