Introduction to Apache Spark with Examples and Use Cases

Spark is an Apache project advertised as "lightning fast cluster computing". It has a thriving open-source community and is the most active Apache project at the moment. Spark provides a faster and more general data processing platform. Spark lets you run programs up to 100x faster in memory, or 10x faster on disk, than Hadoop. Last year, Spark took over Hadoop by completing the 100 TB Daytona GraySort contest 3x faster on one tenth the number of machines and it also became the fastest open source engine for sorting a petabyte. Spark also makes it possible to write code more quickly as you have over 80 high-level operators at your disposal. To demonstrate this, let's have a look at the "Hello World!" of BigData: the Word Count example.