Summary
In this chapter, we briefly covered what big data is all about. We then discussed the computational and analytical challenges involved in big data analytics. Later, we looked at how the analytics space in the context of big data has evolved over a period of time and what the trend has been. We also covered how Spark addressed most of the big data analytics challenges and became a general-purpose unified analytics platform for data science as well as parallel computation. At the end of this chapter, we just gave you a heads-up on the Spark stack and its components.
In the next chapter, we will learn about the Spark programming model. We will take a deep dive into the basic building block of Spark, which is the RDD. Also, we will learn how to program with the RDD API on Scala and Python.
