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Apache Spark: Distributed Data Processing at Scale

Apache Spark processes petabytes of data in memory across hundreds of nodes. Learn core Spark concepts, optimisation techniques, and deployment patterns.

Why Spark?

Traditional MapReduce processed data in sequential disk-bound stages. Spark stores intermediate results in memory, making iterative algorithms (like machine learning) up to 100x faster.

Core Abstractions

  • RDD (Resilient Distributed Dataset): The low-level, fault-tolerant distributed collection.
  • DataFrame: A higher-level, schema-aware abstraction similar to a SQL table — the recommended API.
  • Dataset: A type-safe version of DataFrame for JVM languages.
# Reading and aggregating data with PySparkndf = spark.read.parquet("s3://bucket/events/")nresult = df.groupBy("country").agg({"revenue": "sum"})nresult.write.mode("overwrite").parquet("s3://bucket/output/")