Bigdata and HadoopApache Spark - The future platform for big data

Apache Spark – The future platform for big data

Apache-Spark

As big data becomes one of the most important assets an enterprise can possess, companies are demanding more out of the data. Enterprises expect data to provide complex and multidimensional insights at high speeds. To provide such insights, companies need appropriate framework, technologies and tools. Steep expectations from big data are going to define the relationship between enterprises and data. Apache Spark provides the framework to perform multidimensional actions such as processing, querying and generating analytics at high speeds. Looking at the future, it seems likely that Apache Spark is going to be the most popular platform for big data. An important factor in this context is that Apache Spark is an open source framework which increases its appeal in an otherwise expensive proprietary technology market. Apache Spark is seen as a competitor or successor to MapReduce. There are some experts who still consider Spark a framework at its nascent stages and assuming it can support only a couple of operational analytics.

Context for Apache Spark

Apache Spark has emerged at a time when the enterprises expect the data they have to offer more information, but are constrained by several factors. Enterprises are facing problems on several fronts such as inadequate framework and technology, expensive technology and lack of skilled personnel. Let us examine these problems a little bit more closely.

Inadequate framework

The frameworks available are unable to process data with a high degree of efficiency. Speed, cross-platform compatibility and querying are all, in varying degrees, issues with current software frameworks. With time, the expectations from data are becoming more varied, complex and multidimensional. This is creating a gap between the expectations and the capabilities

High cost of software

Costs of proprietary software or framework are high and that is creating an exclusive club because mid-sized to small companies are unable to purchase and renew the licenses. Only big companies with deep pockets can afford such expenses which means that smaller companies remain deprived of the higher data processing capabilities.

Incompatibility

The available frameworks have compatibility issues with other tools. For example, MapReduce runs only on Hadoop. Spark does not have such compatibility issues. It can run on any resource manager such as YARN or Mesos.

Reasons Apache Spark is the future platform for big data

When you want reasons confirming that Apache Spark is the future platform for big data, it is kind of inevitable to compare Spark with Hadoop. Hadoop is still the most favorite big data processing framework and there had better be good reasons Spark replaces Hadoop. So here are a few reasons Spark is considered the future.

Efficient handling of iterative algorithms

Spark is great at handling programming models involving iterations, interactivity that includes streaming, and much more. On the other hand, MapReduce displays several inefficiencies in handling iterative algorithms. That is a big reason Apache Spark is considered a prime replacement for MapReduce.

Spark provides analytics workflows

When it comes to analytics platforms, Spark provides a wealth of resources. It has, for example, library for machine learning (MLlib), Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for graph analytics, also known as GraphX, support for SQL-based querying, streaming and applications. All these constitute a comprehensive analytics platform. According to Ian Lumb of Bright Computing, Spark can execute workflows in real time or in a batch mode thanks to its interactive shell support that is built-in. It comes with stats package R, a supplemental project, making its analytics stack quite impressive. Additionally, Spark can also access any Hadoop data source, including databases such as Apache Cassandra and Apache HBase.

Better memory management

In a recent benchmarking study on in-memory storage of binary data, it was discovered that Spark outperformed Hadoop by 20x factor. This is because Spark offers the Resilient Distributed Datasets (RDDs). Alan Lumb of Bright Computing adds, “RDDs are fault-tolerant, parallel data structures ideally suited to in-memory cluster computing. Consistent with the Hadoop paradigm, RDDs can persist and be partitioned across a Big Data infrastructure ensuring that data is optimally placed. And, of course, RDDs can be manipulated using a rich set of operators.” So with better memory utilization, enterprises can look forward to better resource management and significant cost savings.

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Better results

In a best-case scenario for Hadoop, Spark beat Hadoop by a 20x factor. See the image below, it shows that Spark beat Hadoop even when memory is unavailable and it has to use its disks.
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According to the Spark Apache website, Spark has an advanced DAG execution engine that results in making it around 100 times faster than Hadoop MapReduce.

Generality

Spark can combine streaming, SQL, and complex analytics. It can power a stack of libraries that include SQL, GraphX, MLlib for machine learning,DataFrames, and Spark Streaming. You can combine all these libraries seamlessly within the same application.

Spark can run everywhere

Spark can run on Mesos, standalone, Hadoop, or in the cloud. It can also access diverse data sources including Cassandra, HDFS, HBase, and S3.

Significant uptake

Spark can put available resources to better use. Bright computing, which provides software solutions for deploying and managing big data clusters and HPC and OpenStack in the data center and in the cloud, observes, that development of the latest version of Spark – the Spark 1.2.0 included over a 172 developers making over 1,000 commits, almost 3 times the number of developers working on the previous release. Spark’s achievements lie in the fact that it can involve the whole community of software developers into contributing.

Summary

While there are a lot of positive vibes about Spark, it still needs to be deployed across enterprises and the use cases need to be tested. Theoretically, the features and capabilities are impressive and it promises to deliver a lot.

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