Apache Spark Beginners Course

Course Fee:AED12,000.00/Course

Apache Spark is an open-source unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing. Spark provides an interface for programming clusters with implicit data parallelism and fault tolerance.

Apache Spark Tutorial

Apache Spark is a lightning-fast cluster computing designed for fast computation. It was built on top of Hadoop MapReduce and it extends the MapReduce model to efficiently use more types of computations which includes Interactive Queries and Stream Processing. This is a brief tutorial that explains the basics of Spark Core programming.

Audience

This tutorial has been prepared for professionals aspiring to learn the basics of Big Data Analytics using Spark Framework and become a Spark Developer. In addition, it would be useful for Analytics Professionals and ETL developers as well.

Prerequisites

Before you start proceeding with this tutorial, we assume that you have prior exposure to Scala programming, database concepts, and any of the Linux operating system flavors.

Apache Spark - Introduction

Industries are using Hadoop extensively to analyze their data sets. The reason is that Hadoop framework is based on a simple programming model (MapReduce) and it enables a computing solution that is scalable, flexible, fault-tolerant and cost effective. Here, the main concern is to maintain speed in processing large datasets in terms of waiting time between queries and waiting time to run the program.

Spark was introduced by Apache Software Foundation for speeding up the Hadoop computational computing software process.

As against a common belief, Spark is not a modified version of Hadoop and is not, really, dependent on Hadoop because it has its own cluster management. Hadoop is just one of the ways to implement Spark.

Spark uses Hadoop in two ways – one is storage and second is processing. Since Spark has its own cluster management computation, it uses Hadoop for storage purpose only.

Apache Spark

Apache Spark is a lightning-fast cluster computing technology, designed for fast computation. It is based on Hadoop MapReduce and it extends the MapReduce model to efficiently use it for more types of computations, which includes interactive queries and stream processing. The main feature of Spark is its in-memory cluster computing that increases the processing speed of an application.

Spark is designed to cover a wide range of workloads such as batch applications, iterative algorithms, interactive queries and streaming. Apart from supporting all these workload in a respective system, it reduces the management burden of maintaining separate tools.

Evolution of Apache Spark

Spark is one of Hadoop’s sub project developed in 2009 in UC Berkeley’s AMPLab by Matei Zaharia. It was Open Sourced in 2010 under a BSD license. It was donated to Apache software foundation in 2013, and now Apache Spark has become a top level Apache project from Feb-2014.

Features of Apache Spark

Apache Spark has following features.

  • Speed − Spark helps to run an application in Hadoop cluster, up to 100 times faster in memory, and 10 times faster when running on disk. This is possible by reducing number of read/write operations to disk. It stores the intermediate processing data in memory.

  • Supports multiple languages − Spark provides built-in APIs in Java, Scala, or Python. Therefore, you can write applications in different languages. Spark comes up with 80 high-level operators for interactive querying.

  • Advanced Analytics − Spark not only supports ‘Map’ and ‘reduce’. It also supports SQL queries, Streaming data, Machine learning (ML), and Graph algorithms.

Spark Built on Hadoop

The following diagram shows three ways of how Spark can be built with Hadoop components.

Spark Built on Hadoop

There are three ways of Spark deployment as explained below.

  • Standalone − Spark Standalone deployment means Spark occupies the place on top of HDFS(Hadoop Distributed File System) and space is allocated for HDFS, explicitly. Here, Spark and MapReduce will run side by side to cover all spark jobs on cluster.

  • Hadoop Yarn − Hadoop Yarn deployment means, simply, spark runs on Yarn without any pre-installation or root access required. It helps to integrate Spark into Hadoop ecosystem or Hadoop stack. It allows other components to run on top of stack.

  • Spark in MapReduce (SIMR) − Spark in MapReduce is used to launch spark job in addition to standalone deployment. With SIMR, user can start Spark and uses its shell without any administrative access.

Components of Spark

The following illustration depicts the different components of Spark.

Components of Spark

Apache Spark Core

Spark Core is the underlying general execution engine for spark platform that all other functionality is built upon. It provides In-Memory computing and referencing datasets in external storage systems.

Spark SQL

Spark SQL is a component on top of Spark Core that introduces a new data abstraction called SchemaRDD, which provides support for structured and semi-structured data.

Spark Streaming

Spark Streaming leverages Spark Core's fast scheduling capability to perform streaming analytics. It ingests data in mini-batches and performs RDD (Resilient Distributed Datasets) transformations on those mini-batches of data.

MLlib (Machine Learning Library)

MLlib is a distributed machine learning framework above Spark because of the distributed memory-based Spark architecture. It is, according to benchmarks, done by the MLlib developers against the Alternating Least Squares (ALS) implementations. Spark MLlib is nine times as fast as the Hadoop disk-based version of Apache Mahout (before Mahout gained a Spark interface).

GraphX

GraphX is a distributed graph-processing framework on top of Spark. It provides an API for expressing graph computation that can model the user-defined graphs by using Pregel abstraction API. It also provides an optimized runtime for this abstraction.

Apache Spark - RDD

Resilient Distributed Datasets

Resilient Distributed Datasets (RDD) is a fundamental data structure of Spark. It is an immutable distributed collection of objects. Each dataset in RDD is divided into logical partitions, which may be computed on different nodes of the cluster. RDDs can contain any type of Python, Java, or Scala objects, including user-defined classes.

Formally, an RDD is a read-only, partitioned collection of records. RDDs can be created through deterministic operations on either data on stable storage or other RDDs. RDD is a fault-tolerant collection of elements that can be operated on in parallel.

There are two ways to create RDDs − parallelizing an existing collection in your driver program, or referencing a dataset in an external storage system, such as a shared file system, HDFS, HBase, or any data source offering a Hadoop Input Format.

Spark makes use of the concept of RDD to achieve faster and efficient MapReduce operations. Let us first discuss how MapReduce operations take place and why they are not so efficient.

Data Sharing is Slow in MapReduce

MapReduce is widely adopted for processing and generating large datasets with a parallel, distributed algorithm on a cluster. It allows users to write parallel computations, using a set of high-level operators, without having to worry about work distribution and fault tolerance.

Unfortunately, in most current frameworks, the only way to reuse data between computations (Ex − between two MapReduce jobs) is to write it to an external stable storage system (Ex − HDFS). Although this framework provides numerous abstractions for accessing a cluster’s computational resources, users still want more.

Both Iterative and Interactive applications require faster data sharing across parallel jobs. Data sharing is slow in MapReduce due to replication, serialization, and disk IO. Regarding storage system, most of the Hadoop applications, they spend more than 90% of the time doing HDFS read-write operations.

Iterative Operations on MapReduce

Reuse intermediate results across multiple computations in multi-stage applications. The following illustration explains how the current framework works, while doing the iterative operations on MapReduce. This incurs substantial overheads due to data replication, disk I/O, and serialization, which makes the system slow.

Iterative Operations on MapReduce

Interactive Operations on MapReduce

User runs ad-hoc queries on the same subset of data. Each query will do the disk I/O on the stable storage, which can dominate application execution time.

The following illustration explains how the current framework works while doing the interactive queries on MapReduce.

Interactive Operations on MapReduce

Data Sharing using Spark RDD

Data sharing is slow in MapReduce due to replication, serialization, and disk IO. Most of the Hadoop applications, they spend more than 90% of the time doing HDFS read-write operations.

Recognizing this problem, researchers developed a specialized framework called Apache Spark. The key idea of spark is Resilient Distributed Datasets (RDD); it supports in-memory processing computation. This means, it stores the state of memory as an object across the jobs and the object is sharable between those jobs. Data sharing in memory is 10 to 100 times faster than network and Disk.

Let us now try to find out how iterative and interactive operations take place in Spark RDD.

Iterative Operations on Spark RDD

The illustration given below shows the iterative operations on Spark RDD. It will store intermediate results in a distributed memory instead of Stable storage (Disk) and make the system faster.

Note − If the Distributed memory (RAM) is not sufficient to store intermediate results (State of the JOB), then it will store those results on the disk.

Iterative Operations on Spark RDD

Interactive Operations on Spark RDD

This illustration shows interactive operations on Spark RDD. If different queries are run on the same set of data repeatedly, this particular data can be kept in memory for better execution times.

Interactive Operations on Spark RDD

By default, each transformed RDD may be recomputed each time you run an action on it. However, you may also persist an RDD in memory, in which case Spark will keep the elements around on the cluster for much faster access, the next time you query it. There is also support for persisting RDDs on disk, or replicated across multiple nodes.