Tag Archives: apache spark

Apache Spark Future

Everyone around the internet is constantly talking about the bright future of Apache Spark. How cool it is, how innovative it is, how fast it is moving, how big its community is, how big the investments into it are, etc. But what is really hiding behind this enthusiasm of Spark adepts, and what is the real future of Apache Spark?

Predicting Apache Spark Future

In this article I show you the real data and real trends, trying to be as agnostic and unbiased as possible. This article is not affiliated with any vendor.

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Open Source Data Community Visualization

Open source data community has been rapidly growing over the last 10 years. You can feel this by the emerge of projects like Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark and the likes. It is growing this fast that there is almost no chance of keeping up with its growth without constantly monitoring the related events, announcements and other changes. 10 years ago it was enough to know “just Oracle” or “just MySQL” to make a successful career in data. Now the things has greatly changed, and if you cannot answer questions like “what is the difference between MapReduce and Spark?” and “when would you prefer to use Flink over Storm?” at your job interview you are screwed.

Github Data Community Graph Snapshot

Also, what would be the “next big thing” in data?

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Spark Memory Management

Starting Apache Spark version 1.6.0, memory management model has changed. The old memory management model is implemented by StaticMemoryManager class, and now it is called “legacy”. “Legacy” mode is disabled by default, which means that running the same code on Spark 1.5.x and 1.6.0 would result in different behavior, be careful with that. For compatibility, you can enable the “legacy” model with spark.memory.useLegacyMode parameter, which is turned off by default.

Previously I have described the “legacy” model of memory management in this article about Spark Architecture almost one year ago. Also I have written an article on Spark Shuffle implementations that briefly touches memory management topic as well.

This article describes new memory management model used in Apache Spark starting version 1.6.0, which is implemented as UnifiedMemoryManager.

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Spark Architecture: Shuffle

This is my second article about Apache Spark architecture and today I will be more specific and tell you about the shuffle, one of the most interesting topics in the overall Spark design. The previous part was mostly about general Spark architecture and its memory management. It can be accessed here. The next one is about Spark memory management and it is available here.

Spark Shuffle Design

What is the shuffle in general? Imagine that you have a list of phone call detail records in a table and you want to calculate amount of calls happened each day. This way you would set the “day” as your key, and for each record (i.e. for each call) you would emit “1” as a value. After this you would sum up values for each key, which would be an answer to your question – total amount of records for each day. But when you store the data across the cluster, how can you sum up the values for the same key stored on different machines? The only way to do so is to make all the values for the same key be on the same machine, after this you would be able to sum them up.

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Spark Architecture

Edit from 2015/12/17: Memory model described in this article is deprecated starting Apache Spark 1.6+, the new memory model is based on UnifiedMemoryManager and described in this article

Over the recent time I’ve answered a series of questions related to ApacheSpark architecture on StackOverflow. All of them seem to be caused by the absence of a good general description of the Spark architecture in the internet. Even official guide does not have that many details and of cause it lacks good diagrams. Same for the “Learning Spark” book and the materials of official workshops.

In this article I would try to fix this and provide a single-stop shop guide for Spark architecture in general and some most popular questions on its concepts. This article is not for complete beginners – it will not provide you an insight on the Spark main programming abstractions (RDD and DAG), but requires their knowledge as a prerequisite.

This is the first article in a series. The second one regarding shuffle is available here. The third one about new memory management model is available here.

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