What resources and data sets are available for teaching big data courses? I currently utilize Cloudera’s QuickStart VM and for Talend’s Big Data Sandbox as part of my big data classes. These touch on frameworks, storage / data access options, data integration, data quality, data governance, and search.

What resources do you use and would suggest for hands on big data labs? Perhaps something for Snowflake, AWS, or Azure to catch cloud aspects of big data? Or some compelling big data tutorials for an analytics tool? Are there curated big data sets especially appropriate for educational use?

I work for a Talend; but also teach big data classes at Washington University in St. Louis.
Related questions:


Good datasets for intro CS courses?
Toy Databases for Class Examples/Homeworks


There are a few Stack Exchange sites you might want to check out:


Open Data: Open Data Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for developers and researchers interested in open data.
Data Science: Data Science Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for Data science professionals, Machine Learning specialists, and those interested in learning more about the field.
Cross Validated: Cross Validated is a question and answer site for people interested in statistics, machine learning, data analysis, data mining, and data visualization.


Kaggle also offers a bunch of example datasets and a bunch of real-world problems that can be used in a class.

But taking a step back, you might want to teach the meta-lesson of finding data in the real world. There are a ton of APIs and open-source data repos out there, and finding them is a very important skill by itself- plus it give students a way to actually use their skills after the class ends.

So instead of just giving your students a flat file, have them come up with their own. Maybe they use an API from a product they use, like Twitter, Spotify, or YouTube. If that's too advanced for the students to do, then maybe you spend a class coming up with the dataset together, with you writing the code and the students talking about what would be interesting to see.

Or just searching for "XYZ datasets" returns a ton of results. Have the students come up with datasets related to stuff they're interested in.