Apache Spark Quick Start Guide - ebook

A practical guide for solving complex data processing challenges by applying the best optimizations techniques in Apache Spark.

Key Features

• Learn about the core concepts and the latest developments in Apache Spark
• Master writing efficient big data applications with Spark’s built-in modules for SQL, Streaming, Machine Learning and Graph analysis
• Get introduced to a variety of optimizations based on the actual experience

Book Description

Apache Spark is a flexible framework that allows processing of batch and real-time data. Its unified engine has made it quite popular for big data use cases. This book will help you to get started with Apache Spark 2.0 and write big data applications for a variety of use cases.

It will also introduce you to Apache Spark – one of the most popular Big Data processing frameworks. Although this book is intended to help you get started with Apache Spark, but it also focuses on explaining the core concepts.

This practical guide provides a quick start to the Spark 2.0 architecture and its components. It teaches you how to set up Spark on your local machine. As we move ahead, you will be introduced to resilient distributed datasets (RDDs) and DataFrame APIs, and their corresponding transformations and actions. Then, we move on to the life cycle of a Spark application and learn about the techniques used to debug slow-running applications. You will also go through Spark’s built-in modules for SQL, streaming, machine learning, and graph analysis.

Finally, the book will lay out the best practices and optimization techniques that are key for writing efficient Spark applications. By the end of this book, you will have a sound fundamental understanding of the Apache Spark framework and you will be able to write and optimize Spark applications.

What you will learn

• Learn core concepts such as RDDs, DataFrames, transformations, and more
• Set up a Spark development environment
• Choose the right APIs for your applications
• Understand Spark’s architecture and the execution flow of a Spark application
• Explore built-in modules for SQL, streaming, ML, and graph analysis
• Optimize your Spark job for better performance

Who this book is for

If you are a big data enthusiast and love processing huge amount of data, this book is for you. If you are data engineer and looking for the best optimization techniques for your Spark applications, then you will find this book helpful. This book also helps data scientists who want to implement their machine learning algorithms in Spark. You need to have a basic understanding of any one of the programming languages such as Scala, Python or Java.

Shrey Mehrotra has over 8 years of IT experience and, for the past 6 years, has been designing the architecture of cloud and big-data solutions for the finance, media, and governance sectors. Having worked on research and development with big-data labs and been part of Risk Technologies, he has gained insights into Hadoop, with a focus on Spark, HBase, and Hive. His technical strengths also include Elasticsearch, Kafka, Java, YARN, Sqoop, and Flume. He likes spending time performing research and development on different big-data technologies. He is the coauthor of the books Learning YARN and Hive Cookbook, a certified Hadoop developer, and he has also written various technical papers. Akash Grade is a data engineer living in New Delhi, India. Akash graduated with a BSc in computer science from the University of Delhi in 2011, and later earned an MSc in software engineering from BITS Pilani. He spends most of his time designing highly scalable data pipeline using big-data solutions such as Apache Spark, Hive, and Kafka. Akash is also a Databricks-certified Spark developer. He has been working on Apache Spark for the last five years, and enjoys writing applications in Python, Go, and SQL.