Introduction to Apache Spark

Apache Spark is an open source framework for processing large datasets stored in heterogeneous data stores in an efficient and fast way. Sophisticated analytical algorithms can be easily executed on these large datasets. Spark can execute a distributed program 100 times faster than MapReduce. As Spark is one of the fast-growing projects in the open source community, it provides a large number of libraries to its users.

We shall cover the following topics in this chapter:

• A brief introduction to Spark
• Spark architecture and the different languages that can be used for coding Spark applications
• Spark components and how these components can be used together to solve a variety of use cases
• A comparison between Spark and Hadoop