by Angela Guess
Brian Taylor reports in TechRepublic, “Apache Spark continues to attract attention in the big data world, where it’s expected to help drive the next wave of innovation. A survey on Hadoop from big data company Syncsort showed that 70% of survey participants are most interested in Spark, higher even than MapReduce, the current adoption leader, at 55%. Syncsort surveyed 250 IT professionals. From that group, 66% were from firms with more than $100 million in annual revenue.”
Taylor goes on, “A healthy interest is not a surprise. In Apache Spark’s relatively short life, there’s been much discussion of its ascendancy. In September, Databricks, the company behind Spark, released results from a survey showing that Spark is the most active open source project in big data with more than 600 contributors within the past year, which is up from 315 in 2014. Plus, Spark is in use not just in the IT industry, but areas like finance, retail, advertising, education, health care, and more. That survey also showed that 51% of Spark users are using three or more Spark components.”
He continues, “It’s also helpful to have backing from a company like Cloudera, which announced in September its own initiative to improve Spark. What that initiative also did was replace MapReduce as the default processing engine for Hadoop— a real-life example of the much-buzzed shift from one to the other. A few months later, Cloudera published a Year in Review for Apache Spark in November 2015 saying that Spark has 50% more activity than the core Apache Hadoop project itself. The report also said that Cloudera has more clients running Spark than all other Hadoop distributions combined. So, yes. Spark is popular.”
photo credit: Spark