MBrace: .NET engine for large-scale data processing | Hacker News Reader

MBrace: .NET engine for large-scale data processing

mbrace.io

66 pointsletrec13 comments

I'm really curious to see how this shapes up against the other gorillas in the ecosystem. The Azure requirement is usually not a problem.

Basically the dialogue is something like, "F# is great and I'd use it but for the restrictive runti... wait it's open sourced? Well .NET isn't open... oh. It is? Has been for awhile now? Well what would this get me over using Spark? Also, I don't actually KNOW F# I just heard MSR people I like saying it's good so..."

And that's a really good question to ask, as Spark has been making massive strides in the industry, as it matches a lot more closely to how many data scientists WANT to work.

I always worry about benchmarks provided by a vendor, but here's a presentation with benchmarks comparing this to Hadoop:

http://www.slideshare.net/EirikGeorgeTsarpalis/mbrace-cloud-...

I wish companies and products like this would do a better job explaining the use cases for these tools. When your sales pitch is "BIG DATA IN THE CLOUD!!!!" it's hard to evaluate how I could use it to my advantage.

I'm really excited about using their "Functional Cloud Data Flows" and "Partitioned Cloud Vectors"... if I knew what the hell that meant and what it would do for me.

100% agree. I kept scrolling looking for an explanation of "When/how would I use this?" but found nothing. I then went to the top menu looking for something - anything, really - but was similarly disappointed.

I then looked at the videos - which is a fail if I have resorted to that. I'm 8 minutes into the first video and I'm still not sure when/why.

Perhaps my biggest frustration came on my 2nd scroll when I encountered this:

"Simple Cloud Programming

MBrace.Core is a cloud programming model simple enough to be explained on a single slide."

Surely I am not the only person who clicked the header expecting to see that slide? No slide...

Interesting to see F# pushed so hard in this. I've dabbled in the language in the past and was just recently thinking about giving it another go, this might be a good impetus to push that up the priority list.

Out of curiosity what are people who've learned f# recently's recommended set of tutorials? The fsharp.org stuff, a book, or somewhere else?

As a free resource, I would highly recommend http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/

If you know C# well, this article should definitely open your eyes about what F# brings to the table:

http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/is-your-language-unre...

These are the resources I am using

1a. fsharpforfunandprofit.com

1b. pluralsight

2. www.hackerrank.com (functional programming section - excercises)

3. There are lot of good books,

Real World Functional Programming

F# Deep Dives

Learning F# Functional Data Structures and Algorithms

honestly, you cannot wrong with any of the books in F#, they are very likely to be good.

Thanks for the reply. I actually have an old O'reilly f# book but it was for either 1.0 or 2.0 and would be nice to have something slightly more recent. Deep Dives was on my radar but hadn't looked too closely at it yet as that smells like a good Second resource once I'm comfortable.

Will have to look through these later.

I wrote already some time ago a post about which books to read to learn F# (see http://jorgetavares.com/2015/01/01/reading-list-for-f-learni...). In the meantime there are a couple more (e.g., Deep Dives) which are also good.

An old video, but still a fun one for getting an intro overview of the language: https://channel9.msdn.com/blogs/pdc2008/tl11

I found articles of Tomas Petriecek interesting and easy to understand.

F# may be preferable because of the REPL unlike C#. No data scientist really wants to work with a language that doesn't have that.

Saw the announcement on twitter https://twitter.com/mbracethecloud/status/664441083351404544

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