Recent advances in technology, along with decreasing hardware costs, led to the development and creation of smart devices and applications that pervade most aspects of daily life. The adoption and use of such technologies and applications in an ever-expanding variety of domains, including social media, entertainment, telecommunications, e-commerce, medical records and e-health, resulted in a rapid explosion in the amount and variety of generated data and to the need to store and analyse this data. The term "big data" refers to the ability to exploit these massive amounts of extremely heterogeneous structure and content data that are routinely generated at an unprecedented scale from an ever-expanding variety of data sources. Business and industry use their big data to extract a better understanding of their customers’ needs and behaviour, develop targeted new products and cut operational costs. The competitive advantages and productivity gains that big data brought led to a great number of big data projects and a shortage of people with the required skills. This course is aimed at people who want to move into this rapidly expanding and exciting area; it has a strong vocational flavour as it has been designed to build your knowledge and understanding of big data systems architectures and to equip you with a range of highly marketable, hands-on skills employed by the core technologies utilised in big data projects.