Book Image

Distributed Data Systems with Azure Databricks

By : Alan Bernardo Palacio
Book Image

Distributed Data Systems with Azure Databricks

By: Alan Bernardo Palacio

Overview of this book

Microsoft Azure Databricks helps you to harness the power of distributed computing and apply it to create robust data pipelines, along with training and deploying machine learning and deep learning models. Databricks' advanced features enable developers to process, transform, and explore data. Distributed Data Systems with Azure Databricks will help you to put your knowledge of Databricks to work to create big data pipelines. The book provides a hands-on approach to implementing Azure Databricks and its associated methodologies that will make you productive in no time. Complete with detailed explanations of essential concepts, practical examples, and self-assessment questions, you’ll begin with a quick introduction to Databricks core functionalities, before performing distributed model training and inference using TensorFlow and Spark MLlib. As you advance, you’ll explore MLflow Model Serving on Azure Databricks and implement distributed training pipelines using HorovodRunner in Databricks. Finally, you’ll discover how to transform, use, and obtain insights from massive amounts of data to train predictive models and create entire fully working data pipelines. By the end of this MS Azure book, you’ll have gained a solid understanding of how to work with Databricks to create and manage an entire big data pipeline.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introducing Databricks
4
Section 2: Data Pipelines with Databricks
9
Section 3: Machine and Deep Learning with Databricks

Loading data

Comma-separated values (CSV) are the most widely used format for tabular data in machine learning applications. As the name suggests, it stores data arranged in the form of rows, separated by commas or tabs.

This section covers information about loading data specifically for machine learning and deep learning applications. Although we can consider these concepts covered in the previous chapters and sections, we will reinforce concepts around how we can read tabular data directly into Azure Databricks and which are the best practices to do this.

Reading data from DBFS

When training machine learning algorithms in a distributed computing environment such as Azure Databricks, the need to have shared storage becomes important, especially when working with distributed deep learning applications. Azure Databricks File System (DBFS) allows efficient access to data for any cluster using Spark and local file application programming interfaces (APIs):

In Azure Databricks...