What is Spark?

According to Apache, Spark is a fast and general engine for large-scale data processing. This is actually a really good summary of what it's all about. If you have a really massive dataset that can represent anything - weblogs, genomics data, you name it - Spark can slice and dice that data up. It can distribute the processing among a huge cluster of computers, taking a data analysis problem that's just too big to run on one machine and divide and conquer it by splitting it up among multiple machines.

Spark is scalable

The way that Spark scales data analysis problems is, it runs on top of a cluster manager, so your actual Spark scripts are just everyday scripts written in Python, Java, or Scala; they...