Alex Rasmussen, Principal Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, shares his expertise on large-scale data processing and cost management in cloud environments. He emphasizes the importance of preparing high-quality data for analysis, leveraging machine learning and AI to solve problems, and adopting agile and fragmented database architectures. With a background in internships at Google and Microsoft, and experience as a VP and consultant for startups and SMBs, Alex has seen promising developments in wrangling Big Data. He notes that the open-source framework of Hadoop opened up possibilities around building scalable clusters of machines, and that rapid progress in cloud data warehouses has changed the way people reason about these systems. Alex also highlights the importance of cost management, using AWS costs effectively to avoid spiraling costs, and advises business leaders to carefully evaluate their problems before investing in machine learning initiatives.