When talking about the cloud, nearly everybody has a different view. Some think of virtual machines, which you can start and stop instantaneously, while some others think of file storage. But the cloud is more than that. In this chapter, we will talk about using Apache Spark in the cloud. But this is, of course, more than provisioning some virtual machines and installing an Apache Spark cluster on it.
We are talking about the so-called Platform as a service clouds (PaaS), where everything is a service, ready to be consumed, and the operation of components is done by the cloud provider. Therefore, on PaaS clouds, Apache Spark is pre-installed. This is done in a way that workers can be added to and removed from the cluster on-the-fly. But not only is Apache Spark pre-installed, the required tooling around it is also...
