Real world experience means that one gets to work on real machinery in a real production environment. Quite often the experience of working in a real environment is far different from that of a simulated one. Obviously, the real environment is valued more by the Big Data world as opposed to the simulated one. To make that possible, we have come up with CloudxLab. CloudxLab is basically a cluster of computers (networked computers) which comes pre-installed with the necessary technology stack, including Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, Kafka, Python, R and other related technologies.
As compared to a simulated environment such as a Virtual Machine of Hadoop (basically a virtual machine that needs to be downloaded and run on a single computer), a cluster based learning provides a far more real experience. A virtual machine is run only on one machine while most of the Big Data technology components run on multiple computers.
For example, any MapReduce (one of the most important Hadoop components which is used to process large data sets with a parallel, distributed algorithm on a cluster) task on a virtual machine will only run on that single machine which goes against the whole concept of parallel, distributed computing used by Big Data technologies. Which is why to learn Big Data tools a cluster with multiple computers is imperative. Use CloudxLab to get a real world experience of Big Data technology on a cluster.