by Angela Guess
A new article out of the organization reports, “Databricks, the company founded by the team that created Apache® Spark™, today announced the General Availability of Databricks Community Edition (DCE), a free version of the just-in-time data platform built on top of open source Apache Spark, at Spark Summit 2016. DCE is accessible to all users today to learn Apache Spark quickly and easily with no infrastructure headaches. The announcement comes just four months after the beta launch of Databricks Community Edition at Spark Summit East in New York.”
The article continues, “Since the beta launch of Databricks Community Edition in February 2016, more than 8,000 users have registered for the free platform. Users have created over 61,000 notebooks in four different languages, including Python, Scala, SQL, and R. A survey conducted by Databricks of the DCE beta users identified that 60 percent of users were neither data scientists nor engineers, enabling a new category of people to learn Apache Spark, data science and data engineering skills. A recent survey conducted by Stack Overflow, an online community for programmers, found that Apache Spark talent is in high demand. The General Availability of DCE will open up an ideal environment for users learning Spark, accelerate the growth and adoption of Spark, and enable new users to contribute to the community.”
Ion Stoica, cofounder and executive chairman at Databricks, added, “Today’s enterprises have an insatiable demand for data skills, which is exacerbated by the scarcity of qualified talent. Education is in Databricks’ DNA, and our birthplace at the UC Berkeley AMPLab gives the company significant experience in educating students and users. Databricks Community Edition augments that effort as a learning platform. More than 2,200 students have already taken courses using Databricks Community Edition since its beta release, and with its general availability, we expect widespread adoption by universities across the world.”
Photo credit: Databricks