Book Image

Mastering Apache Spark 2.x - Second Edition

Book Image

Mastering Apache Spark 2.x - Second Edition

Overview of this book

Apache Spark is an in-memory, cluster-based Big Data processing system that provides a wide range of functionalities such as graph processing, machine learning, stream processing, and more. This book will take your knowledge of Apache Spark to the next level by teaching you how to expand Spark’s functionality and build your data flows and machine/deep learning programs on top of the platform. The book starts with a quick overview of the Apache Spark ecosystem, and introduces you to the new features and capabilities in Apache Spark 2.x. You will then work with the different modules in Apache Spark such as interactive querying with Spark SQL, using DataFrames and DataSets effectively, streaming analytics with Spark Streaming, and performing machine learning and deep learning on Spark using MLlib and external tools such as H20 and Deeplearning4j. The book also contains chapters on efficient graph processing, memory management and using Apache Spark on the cloud. By the end of this book, you will have all the necessary information to master Apache Spark, and use it efficiently for Big Data processing and analytics.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
10
Deep Learning on Apache Spark with DeepLearning4j and H2O

Chapter 1. A First Taste and What’s New in Apache Spark V2

Apache Spark is a distributed and highly scalable in-memory data analytics system, providing you with the ability to develop applications in Java, Scala, and Python, as well as languages such as R. It has one of the highest contribution/involvement rates among the Apache top-level projects at this time. Apache systems, such as Mahout, now use it as a processing engine instead of MapReduce. It is also possible to use a Hive context to have the Spark applications process data directly to and from Apache Hive.

Initially, Apache Spark provided four main submodules--SQL, MLlib, GraphX, and Streaming. They will all be explained in their own chapters, but a simple overview would be useful here. The modules are interoperable, so data can be passed between them. For instance, streamed data can be passed to SQL and a temporary table can be created. Since version 1.6.0, MLlib has a sibling called SparkML with a different API, which we will cover in later chapters.

The following figure explains how this book will address Apache Spark and its modules:

The top two rows show Apache Spark and its submodules. Wherever possible, we will try to illustrate by giving an example of how the functionality may be extended using extra tools.

Note

We infer that Spark is an in-memory processing system. When used at scale (it cannot exist alone), the data must reside somewhere. It will probably be used along with the Hadoop tool set and the associated ecosystem.

Luckily, Hadoop stack providers, such as IBM and Hortonworks, provide you with an open data platform, a Hadoop stack, and cluster manager, which integrates with Apache Spark, Hadoop, and most of the current stable toolset fully based on open source.

During this book, we will use Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP®) Sandbox 2.6.

You can use an alternative configuration, but we find that the open data platform provides most of the tools that we need and automates the configuration, leaving us more time for development.

In the following sections, we will cover each of the components mentioned earlier in more detail before we dive into the material starting in the next chapter:

  • Spark Machine Learning
  • Spark Streaming
  • Spark SQL
  • Spark Graph Processing
  • Extended Ecosystem
  • Updates in Apache Spark
  • Cluster design
  • Cloud-based deployments
  • Performance parameters