Apache Spark Intro

In case anyone is curious, I am a full-stack web developer for about three years now, so that has been a pretty interesting journey working through the Information Technology field. It is a very good field to be in and to me, it is very hard work to get into, but it is worth it. You get to learn a lot about computer technology and different types of software which are useful to learn about like Apache Spark.

Apache Spark is currently the de-facto standard unified analytics engine for big data. The software is open-source under Apache License 2.0, so the software is both free and you can modify it for your own usage as a professional. You can download Apache Spark from the official website at spark.apache.org. The program was originally developed at University of California, Berkeley’s AMPLab before it became the industry standard it is today. Apache Spark became the de-facto standard in 2014 where it outperformed the previous standard unified analytics engine for big data. In fact, Spark was three times faster than the previous champion and used ten times less computers than its opponent in order to earn the title of big data processing king!

Over 250 organizations and a bunch of developers and adopters have contributed to the development of Apache Spark. This has allowed Apache Spark to continue to stay modern for others to use. Spark is perfect for data analytics and machine learning algorithms. Spark has benefits over other forms of unified big data programs: it is fast, unified, easy to use, is available in multiple operating systems (Windows, MacOS, and Linux), and easy to learn. Spark can also be used to process data in real-time, allowing data to be processed as soon as it is received instead of being dealt with some time after the program gets the information. Now, that you have an introduction to Spark, I can go deeper into how the software works in a future article...