"Apache Spark" entries

Using Apache Spark to predict attack vectors among billions of users and trillions of events

The O’Reilly Data Show podcast: Fang Yu on data science in security, unsupervised learning, and Apache Spark.

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In this episode of the O’Reilly Data Show, I spoke with Fang Yu, co-founder and CTO of DataVisor. We discussed her days as a researcher at Microsoft, the application of data science and distributed computing to security, and hiring and training data scientists and engineers for the security domain.

DataVisor is a startup that uses data science and big data to detect fraud and malicious users across many different application domains in the U.S. and China. Founded by security researchers from Microsoft, the startup has developed large-scale unsupervised algorithms on top of Apache Spark, to (as Yu notes in our chat) “predict attack vectors early among billions of users and trillions of events.”

Several years ago, I found myself immersed in the security space and at that time tools that employed machine learning and big data were still rare. More recently, with the rise of tools like Apache Spark and Apache Kafka, I’m starting to come across many more security professionals who incorporate large-scale machine learning and distributed systems into their software platforms and consulting practices.

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Investing in big data technologies

The O’Reilly Data Show podcast: A fireside chat with Ben Horowitz, plus Reynold Xin on the rise of Apache Spark in China.

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In this special holiday episode of the O’Reilly Data Show, I look back at two conversations I had earlier this year at the Spark Summit in San Francisco. The first segment is an on-stage fireside chat with Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz and author of The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

In the second segment, Reynold Xin, one of the architects of Apache Spark, explains the rise of Apache Spark in China.

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Accelerating real-time analytics with Spark

Integration of the data supply chain is key to a reliable and fast big data analytics deployment.

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Watch our free webcast “Accelerating Advanced Analytics with Spark” to learn about the architecture, applications, and best practices of Apache Spark.

Apache Hadoop is a mature development framework, which coupled with its large ecosystem, and support and contributions from key players such as Cloudera, Hortonworks, and Yahoo, provides organizations with many tools to manage data of varying sizes.

In the past, Hadoop’s batch-oriented nature using MapReduce was sufficient to meet the processing needs of many organizations. However, increasing demands for faster processing of data have emerged. These demands have been driven by recent developments in streaming technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT) and real-time analytics, to name just a few. These new demands have required new processing models. One significant new technology today that is being used to meet these demands and is gaining considerable interest and widespread support is Apache Spark. Spark’s speed and versatility make it a key part of today’s big-data processing stack in industries from energy to finance. Read more…

Apache Spark: Powering applications on-premise and in the cloud

The O'Reilly Data Show Podcast: Patrick Wendell on the state of the Spark ecosystem.

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As organizations shift their focus toward building analytic applications, many are relying on components from the Apache Spark ecosystem. I began pointing this out in advance of the first Spark Summit in 2013 and since then, Spark adoption has exploded.

With Spark Summit SF right around the corner, I recently sat down with Patrick Wendell, release manager of Apache Spark and co-founder of Databricks, for this episode of the O’Reilly Data Show Podcast. (Full disclosure: I’m an advisor to Databricks). We talked about how he came to join the UC Berkeley AMPLab, the current state of Spark ecosystem components, Spark’s future roadmap, and interesting applications built on top of Spark.

User-driven from inception

From the beginning, Spark struck me as different from other academic research projects (many of which “wither away” when grad students leave). The AMPLab team behind Spark spoke at local SF Bay Area meetups, they hosted 2-day events (AMP Camp), and worked hard to help early users. That mindset continues to this day. Wendell explained:

We were trying to work with the early users of Spark, getting feedback on what issues it had and what types of problems they were trying to solve with Spark, and then use that to influence the roadmap. It was definitely a more informal process, but from the very beginning, we were expressly user-driven in the way we thought about building Spark, which is quite different than a lot of other open source projects. We never really built it for our own use — it was not like we were at a company solving a problem and then we decided, “hey let’s let other people use this code for free”. … From the beginning, we were focused on empowering other people and building platforms for other developers, so I always thought that was quite unique about Spark.

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Recent performance improvements in Apache Spark

The goal is to offer a single platform where users can get the best distributed algorithms for any data processing task.

2014 has been the most active year of Spark development to date, with major improvements across the entire engine. One particular area where it made great strides was performance: Spark set a new world record in 100TB sorting, beating the previous record held by Hadoop MapReduce by three times, using only one-tenth of the resources; it received a new SQL query engine with a state-of-the-art optimizer; and many of its built-in algorithms became five times faster. In this post, I’ll cover some of the technology behind these improvements as well as new performance work the Apache Spark developer community has done to speed up Spark.

Back in 2010, we at the AMPLab at UC Berkeley designed Spark for interactive queries and iterative algorithms, as these were two major use cases not well served by batch frameworks like MapReduce. As a result, early users were drawn to Spark because of the significant performance improvements in these workloads. However, performance optimization is a never-ending process, and as Spark’s use cases have grown, so have the areas looked at for further improvement. User feedback and detailed measurements helped the Apache Spark developer community to prioritize areas to work in. Starting with the core engine, I’ll cover some of the recent optimizations that have been made. Read more…

Apache Spark’s journey from academia to industry

In this O'Reilly Data Show Podcast: Ion Stoica talks about the rise of Apache Spark and Apache Mesos.

Three projects from UC Berkeley’s AMPLab have been keenly adopted by industry: Apache Mesos, Apache Spark, and Tachyon. As an early user, it’s been fun to watch Spark go from an academic lab to the most active open source project in big data. In my recent travels, I’ve met Spark users from companies of all sizes and and from many industries. I’ve also spoken with companies that came of age before Spark was available or mature enough, and many are replacing homegrown tools with Spark (Full disclosure: I’m an advisor to Databricks, a start-up commercializing Apache Spark..)

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A few months ago, I spoke with UC Berkeley Professor and Databricks CEO Ion Stoica about the early days of Spark and the Berkeley Data Analytics Stack. Ion noted that by the time his students began work on Spark and Mesos, his experience at his other start-up Conviva had already informed some of the design choices:

“Actually, this story started back in 2009, and it started with a different project, Mesos. So, this was a class project in a class I taught in the spring of 2009. And that was to build a cluster management system, to be able to support multiple cluster computing frameworks like Hadoop, at that time, MPI and others. To share the same cluster as the data in the cluster. Pretty soon after that, we thought about what to build on top of Mesos, and that was Spark. Initially, we wanted to demonstrate that it was actually easier to build a new framework from scratch on top of Mesos, and of course we wanted it to be also special. So, we targeted workloads for which Hadoop at that time was not good enough. Hadoop was targeting batch computation. So, we targeted interactive queries and iterative computation, like machine learning. Read more…

Announcing Spark Certification

A new partnership between O’Reilly and Databricks offers certification and training in Apache Spark.

Editor’s note: full disclosure — Ben is an advisor to Databricks.

spark-logoI am pleased to announce a joint program between O’Reilly and Databricks to certify Spark developers. O’Reilly has long been interested in certification, and with this inaugural program, we believe we have the right combination — an ascendant framework and a partnership with the team behind the technology. The founding team of Databricks comprises members of the UC Berkeley AMPLab team that created Spark.

The certification exam will be offered at Strata events, through Databricks’ Spark Summits, and at training workshops run by Databricks and its partner companies. A variety of O’Reilly resources will accompany the certification program, including books, training days, and videos targeted at developers and companies interested in the Apache Spark ecosystem. Read more…