Introducing Elastic MapReduce
The easiest way to actually get up and running on a cluster, if you don't already have a Spark cluster, is using Amazon's Elastic MapReduce service. Even though it says MapReduce in the name, you can actually configure it to set up a Spark cluster for you and run that on top of Hadoop – it sets everything up for you automatically. Let's walk through what Elastic MapReduce is, how it interacts with Spark, and how to decide if it's really something you want to be messing with.
Why use Elastic MapReduce?
Using Amazon's Elastic MapReduce service is an easy way to rent the time you need on a cluster to actually run your Spark job. You don't have to just run MapReduce jobs, you can actually run Spark and use the underlying Hadoop environment to run as your cluster manager. It has something called Hadoop YARN. If you've taken my course on MapReduce and Hadoop you will have heard of this already. Basically, YARN is Hadoop's cluster manager and Spark is able to run on...