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Data + AI Foundations

What is a Hosted Spark?

Unified data platform with REST API access to Spark clusters for remote applications, enabling interactive and batch data exploration in multiple languages

by Databricks Staff

  • Hosted Spark describes cloud services that run Apache Spark for you so teams can use Spark without installing or managing their own clusters.
  • The provider handles provisioning, scaling, monitoring and upgrades, while users focus on writing jobs, notebooks and SQL queries.
  • Databricks offers a fully hosted Spark environment with optimizations, security and collaboration features that simplify large scale data and AI workloads.

What is Hosted Spark?

Apache Spark is a fast and general cluster computing system for Big Data built around speed, ease of use, and advanced analytics that was originally built in 2009 at UC Berkeley. It provides high-level APIs in Scala, Java, Python, and R, and an optimized engine that supports general computation graphs for data analysis. In addition, it also supports several other tools such as Spark SQL for SQL and DataFrames, MLlib for machine learning, GraphX for graph processing, and Spark Streaming for stream processing.

Spark Provides Two Modes for Data Exploration:

  • Interactive
  • Batch

Spark Exploration Modes For a simplified end-user interaction, Spark is also provided to organizations in a unified hosted data platform. In the absence of direct access to Spark resources by remote applications, the user had to face a longer route to production. In order to overcome this obstacle, there have been created services that enable remote apps to efficiently connect to a Spark cluster over a REST API from anywhere. These interfaces support the execution of snippets of code or programs in a Spark context that runs locally or in Apache Hadoop YARN. Hosted Spark interfaces proved to be turnkey solutions as they facilitate the interaction between Spark and application servers, streamlining the architecture required by interactive web and mobile apps.

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Hosted Spark Services Provide These Features:

  • Interactive Scala, Python, and R coverings
  • Batch submissions in Scala, Java, Python
  • Multiple users are able to share the same server
  • Allows users to submit jobs from anywhere through REST
  • No code change is required do be done to your programs

Organizations can now easily overcome the existing bottlenecks that impede their ability to operationalize Spark, and instead, focus on capturing the value promised by big data.  

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