What is Apache Spark?

Apache Spark is a unified analytics engine for processing big data, developed as an open source project in 2009 at the University of California, Berkeley’s AMPLab. Initially, it was created as a class project to address the limitations of the Hadoop framework in exchanging data between iterations through HDFS for machine learning use cases. The objective was to design a new framework for fast interactive processing, including machine learning and interactive data analysis, while retaining the implicit data parallelism and fault tolerance of MapReduce and HDFS from the Hadoop framework. It incorporates in-memory caching and is optimized for analytics workloads of any size.

Apache Spark was open sourced in 2010 under a BSD License, and in 2013, the project was contributed to the Apache Software Foundation. In 2014, Spark became a top-level Apache project. It has garnered over 1.7 thousand contributors and over 30K stargazers on GitHub.

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