Amarkant Singh is a Big Data specialist. Being one of the initial users of Amazon Elastic MapReduce, he has used it extensively to build and deploy many Big Data solutions. He has been working with Apache Hadoop and EMR for almost 4 years now. He is also a certified AWS Solutions Architect. As an engineer, he has designed and developed enterprise applications of various scales. He is currently leading the product development team at one of the most happening cloud-based enterprises in the Asia-Pacific region. He is also an all-time top user on Stack Overflow for EMR at the time of writing this book. He blogs at http://www.bigdataspeak.com/ and is active on Twitter as @singh_amarkant. Vijay Rayapati is the CEO of Minjar Cloud Solutions Pvt. Ltd., one of the leading providers of cloud and Big Data solutions on public cloud platforms. He has over 10 years of experience in building business rule engines, data analytics platforms, and real-time analysis systems used by many leading enterprises across the world, including Fortune 500 businesses. He has worked on various technologies such as LISP, .NET, Java, Python, and many NoSQL databases. He has rearchitected and led the initial development of a large-scale location intelligence and analytics platform using Hadoop and AWS EMR. He has worked with many ad networks, e-commerce, financial, and retail companies to help them design, implement, and scale their data analysis and BI platforms on the AWS Cloud. He is passionate about open source software, large-scale systems, and performance engineering. He is active on Twitter as @amnigos, he blogs at amnigos.com, and his GitHub profile is https://github.com/amnigos.
