Apache Spark has become one of the key cluster-computing frameworks in the world. Spark can be deployed in numerous ways like in Machine Learning, streaming data, and graph processing. Spark supports programming languages like Python, Scala, Java, and R. In this section, we will understand what Apache Spark is.
One of the biggest challenges with respect to Big Data is analyzing the data. There are multiple solutions available to do this. The most popular one is Apache Hadoop.
Apache Hadoop is an open-source framework written in Java that allows us to store and process Big Data in a distributed environment, across various clusters of computers using simple programming constructs. To do this, Hadoop uses an algorithm called MapReduce, which divides the task into small parts and assigns them to a set of computers. Hadoop also has its own file system, Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), which is based on Google File System (GFS). HDFS is designed to run on low-cost hardware.
Apache Spark is an open-source distributed cluster-computing framework. Spark is a data processing engine developed to provide faster and easy-to-use analytics than Hadoop MapReduce. Before Apache Software Foundation took possession of Spark, it was under the control of University of California, Berkeley’s AMP Lab.
Although it is known that Hadoop is the most powerful tool of Big Data, there are various drawbacks for Hadoop. Some of them are:
Having outlined all these drawbacks of Hadoop, it is clear that there was a scope for improvement, which is why Spark was introduced.
Spark as a whole consists of various libraries, APIs, databases, etc. The main components of Apache Spark are as follows:
Spare Core is the basic building block of Spark, which includes all components for job scheduling, performing various memory operations, fault tolerance, and more. Spark Core is also home to the API that consists of RDD. Moreover, Spark Core provides APIs for building and manipulating data in RDD.
Apache Spark works with the unstructured data using its ‘go to’ tool, Spark SQL. Spark SQL allows querying data via SQL, as well as via Apache Hive’s form of SQL called Hive Query Language (HQL). It also supports data from various sources like parse tables, log files, JSON, etc. Spark SQL allows programmers to combine SQL queries with programmable changes or manipulations supported by RDD in Python, Java, Scala, and R.
Spark Streaming processes live streams of data. Data generated by various sources is processed at the very instant by Spark Streaming. Examples of this data include log files, messages containing status updates posted by users, etc.
GraphX is Apache Spark’s library for enhancing graphs and enabling graph-parallel computation. Apache Spark includes a number of graph algorithms which help users in simplifying graph analytics.
Apache Spark comes up with a library containing common Machine Learning (ML) services called MLlib. It provides various types of ML algorithms including regression, clustering, and classification, which can perform various operations on data to get meaningful insights out of it.