Apache Spark is a powerful open source processing engine originally developed by Matei Zaharia as a part of his PhD thesis while at UC Berkeley. The first version of Spark was released in 2012. Since then, in 2013, Zaharia co-founded and has become the CTO at Databricks; he also holds a professor position at Stanford, coming from MIT. At the same time, the Spark codebase was donated to the Apache Software Foundation and has become its flagship project.
Apache Spark is fast, easy to use framework, that allows you to solve a wide variety of complex data problems whether semi-structured, structured, streaming, and/or machine learning / data sciences. It also has become one of the largest open source communities in big data with more than 1,000 contributors from 250+ organizations and with 300,000+ Spark Meetup community members in more than 570+ locations worldwide.
In this chapter, we will provide a primer to understanding Apache Spark. We will explain the concepts behind Spark Jobs and APIs, introduce the Spark 2.0 architecture, and explore the features of Spark 2.0.
The topics covered are:
- What is Apache Spark?
- Spark Jobs and APIs
- Review of Resilient Distributed Datasets (RDDs), DataFrames, and Datasets
- Review of Catalyst Optimizer and Project Tungsten
- Review of the Spark 2.0 architecture
Apache Spark is an open-source powerful distributed querying and processing engine. It provides flexibility and extensibility of MapReduce but at significantly higher speeds: Up to 100 times faster than Apache Hadoop when data is stored in memory and up to 10 times when accessing disk.
Apache Spark allows the user to read, transform, and aggregate data, as well as train and deploy sophisticated statistical models with ease. The Spark APIs are accessible in Java, Scala, Python, R and SQL. Apache Spark can be used to build applications or package them up as libraries to be deployed on a cluster or perform quick analytics interactively through notebooks (like, for instance, Jupyter, Spark-Notebook, Databricks notebooks, and Apache Zeppelin).
Apache Spark exposes a host of libraries familiar to data analysts, data scientists or researchers who have worked with Python's pandas or R's data.frames or data.tables. It is important to note that while Spark DataFrames will be familiar to pandas or data.frames / data.tables users, there are some differences so please temper your expectations. Users with more of a SQL background can use the language to shape their data as well. Also, delivered with Apache Spark are several already implemented and tuned algorithms, statistical models, and frameworks: MLlib and ML for machine learning, GraphX and GraphFrames for graph processing, and Spark Streaming (DStreams and Structured). Spark allows the user to combine these libraries seamlessly in the same application.
Apache Spark can easily run locally on a laptop, yet can also easily be deployed in standalone mode, over YARN, or Apache Mesos - either on your local cluster or in the cloud. It can read and write from a diverse data sources including (but not limited to) HDFS, Apache Cassandra, Apache HBase, and S3:
Source: Apache Spark is the smartphone of Big Data http://bit.ly/1QsgaNj
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For more information, please refer to: Apache Spark is the Smartphone of Big Data at http://bit.ly/1QsgaNj