What is Apache Spark – A Quick Guide to Drift in Spark

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1. Objective

In this Apache Spark tutorial, we will have a brief look at What is Apache Spark, What is the history of Spark? Apache Spark is an advanced analytics engine which can easily process real-time data. It is an in-memory processing framework which is efficient and much faster as compared to others like MapReduce. This tutorial will also cover ecosystem of Spark, Features of Apache Spark and industries those are using Apache Spark for day by day data operations.

What is Apache Spark - A Quick Guide to Drift in Spark

What is Apache Spark – A Quick Guide to Drift in Spark

2. What is Apache Spark?

Earlier Hadoop MapReduce became very popular because of its efficiency to process large datasets. MapReduce is a framework which supports only Batch Processing. What if anybody wants to perform real-time analytics? What if anybody wants to process live streaming data? All these problems are addressed by a very popular data processing engine that is Apache Spark.

Spark was introduced by UC Berkeley’s in 2009, later in 2013, the project was donated to the Apache Software Foundation. Apache Spark became a top-level Apache project in 2014.

Apache Spark is an advanced analytics engine which can easily process real-time data. It is an in-memory processing framework which is efficient and much faster as compared to MapReduce. Apache Spark is highly efficient in iterative data processing. It writes the intermediate data into the memory so data need to be processed is already present in the memory so there is no need to read/write the data from disk (which saves huge disk seek time) in each step.

You can also refer this video tutorial for Apache Spark for more understanding.

3. Components of Spark

Ecosystem Components of Apache Spark

Ecosystem Components of Apache Spark

After studying what is Apache Spark, let’s now discuss the Spark Ecosystem which empowers the Spark functionality.

3.1. Spark Core

Apache Spark core is the execution engine for Spark which handles critical functionalities of Apache Spark like- memory management, task scheduling, interaction with storage systems and fault recovery. Spark core also consists of various APIs like R, Java, Python, Scala, etc. It is also a home to the APIs that define resilient distributed datasets (RDDs) which are the main programming abstraction of Apache Spark.

3.2. Spark SQL

Apache Spark SQL is built on the top of Spark core which handles querying data via SQL queries and it also supports Apache Hive variant of SQL that is Hive Query Language (HQL). Along with providing a SQL support to Spark, it also supports developers to combine SQL queries with the various programmatic data manipulations supported by RDDs in Java, Scala, and Python.

3.3. Spark Streaming

Apache Spark Streaming is the component which supports processing of live streaming of data. Spark Streaming provides the APIs which is like the Spark Core’s RDD provided by Spark Core. It helps a programmer to manipulate data stored on disk, in memory or arriving in real time.

3.4. MLlib

Spark MLlib is a library consists of common machine learning (ML) functionalities. It provides various kinds of machine learning algorithms. Spark MLlib includes regression, clustering, classification and collaborative filtering. It also provides functionality like model evaluation.

3.5. GraphX

GraphX is a library used for performing parallel computations and manipulations of graphs in Apache Spark. Spark GraphX also extends the Spark RDD APIs similarly as Spark core and Spark SQL. It allows us to create a directed graph. For manipulating graphs, GraphX provides various operators and a library of common graph algorithms.

3.6 SparkR

It is R package that gives light-weight frontend to use Apache Spark from R. The main idea behind SparkR was to explore different techniques to integrate the usability of R with the scalability of Spark. It allows data scientists to analyze large datasets and interactively run jobs on them from the R shell.

4. Feature of Apache Spark

Till now we have answered what is Apache Spark, what are the Spark ecosystem components? Now we will discuss the advantages of Apache Spark due to which Spark come into limelight. The various features of Spark are:

4.1 Speed

Speed is the reason behind the popularity of Apache Spark in various IT organizations. Since read/write operations get reduce while using Spark. Thus it is 100 times faster in memory processing and 10 times faster in disk processing.

4.2. Reusability

Apache Spark provides the provision of code reusability for batch processing, join streams against historical data, or run ad-hoc queries on stream state.

4.3. Fault tolerance

Spark and its RDD abstraction are designed to seamlessly handle failures of any worker nodes in the cluster. Thus, the loss of data and information is negligible. Follow this guide to learn Spark Fault tolerance feature in detail.

4.4 High-level Analytics

The best and unique feature of Apache Spark is its versatility. It supports Machine learning (ML), Graph algorithms, SQL queries and Streaming data along with MapReduce.

4.5 Supports Many Languages

Spark provides built-in APIs for various languages like Java, Scala or Python. Thus, it is possible to write applications in different languages.

5. Spark in Industries

IT organizations, for example, Cloudera, Pivotal, IBM, Intel, and MapR have all used Spark into their Hadoop stacks. Databricks, an organization established by a part of the developers of Spark, offers business backing for the product. Companies like Yahoo, NASA, Amazon, AutoDesk, eBay, Groupon, Taboola, TripAdvisor, Zaloni, among others, use the product for day by day data operations.

6. Conclusion

In conclusion, Apache Spark is a cluster computing platform designed to be fast, speed side and extends the popular MapReduce model to efficiently supports more type of computations, including interactive queries and stream processing. Since Spark integrates closely with other big data tool, hence this tight integration is the ability to build an application that seamlessly combines different computation model.

I hope you now you are comfortable with Spark, so try your hands on Apache Spark Quiz and test your knowledge.

For any query related to Apache Spark, please leave a comment.
See Also-

Reference:
http://spark.apache.org/

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22 Responses

  1. Gati says:

    Good introduction.

    • DataFlair Team says:

      Hi Gati,

      It’s our pleasure that you liked our work on “What is Apache Spark” Tutorial. We are glad that you taking the time to share your experience with us.

      We refer you to visit more Spark Tutorials, to brush up your Spark knowledge

      Regards,
      Data-Flair

  2. Andy says:

    Amazing to see spark is 100 times faster than hadoop but can it process data in real-time, similar to storm I have worked on storm it can process the data at micro-second latency ?
    Can u share some tutorial for Spark streaming.
    Thanks

  3. mathew says:

    I think apache spark will be the future of big data industry but flink is also coming very fast, please recommend which should I learn spark or flink ?

  4. jhach says:

    Nice article helped me to clear lots of concepts, I am learning Apache Spark from the scratch, can u share few blogs for RDD.
    Thanks..

    • DataFlair Team says:

      HI Jhach,

      We are glad our article helps you, as you are fresher I recommend you to explore our sidebar from top to bottom it cover all the topic of Spark.

      And for Spark RDD, you can refer this Apache Spark RDD

      Regards,
      Data-Flair

  5. Jack Ma says:

    Spark is really amazing, wwe are using MapReduce and soon planning to switch to Spark, can u share the steps of installation of Spark. Thanks

  6. Shonda says:

    Thank you for the effort, keep up the good work Great work.

    • DataFlair Team says:

      Hi Shonda,

      Thanks for motivating us, honest comments inspire us to bring you even better content.

      Please check our Spark Interview Questions, to prepare for the Spark interview.

      Regards,
      Data-Flair

  7. Stefan says:

    I was waiting for this sort of matter. Thank you very much for the
    area.

  8. Jennifer says:

    Very nice introduction to Apache Spark. Please let me know how to install Spark?

  9. Evelyn Serrell says:

    1 Post has covered most of the concepts of Apache Spark. Thanks for sharing it.
    Please help me in understanding if I should learn Java or Scala or Python to learn Apache Spark?

    • DataFlair Team says:

      Hi Evelyn,

      Thanks for referring to our Spark tutorial, your positive thoughts keep us motivated to bring you the best.

      The solution, you can learn Scala or java (basics) to master in Spark or else check our Apache Spark Course

      Regards,

      Data-Flair

  10. Jennifer says:

    Complete Spark guide at 1 place to learn apache spark concepts from expert level. Thanks Dataflair for sharing it.

    • DataFlair Team says:

      Hi Jennifer,

      Thank you, for taking a part in our journey and commenting on our “Spark Tutorial”. We are glad to hear such loyal feedback.

      Regards,
      Data-Flair

  11. Domi says:

    Great post! We arre linking to this great post on our site.
    Keep up the good writing.

    • DataFlair Team says:

      Hi Domi,

      Thanks for the appreciation, we are glad that you linked our blog on your site, there are many Spark blogs – refer our sidebar, which also has good content.

      Regards,
      Data-Flair

  12. Spark and Scala Training In Hyderabad says:

    The content here shared is extra ordinary and unremarkable it will give the full knowledge about the subject.
    thanks a lot

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