"vertical applications" entries

A growing number of applications are being built with Spark

Many more companies want to highlight how they're using Apache Spark in production.

One of the trends we’re following closely at Strata is the emergence of vertical applications. As components for creating large-scale data infrastructures enter their early stages of maturation, companies are focusing on solving data problems in specific industries rather than building tools from scratch. Virtually all of these components are open source and have contributors across many companies. Organizations are also sharing best practices for building big data applications, through blog posts, white papers, and presentations at conferences like Strata.

These trends are particularly apparent in a set of technologies that originated from UC Berkeley’s AMPLab: the number of companies that are using (or plan to use) Spark in production1 has exploded over the last year. The surge in popularity of the Apache Spark ecosystem stems from the maturation of its individual open source components and the growing community of users. The tight integration of high-performance tools that address different problems and workloads, coupled with a simple programming interface (in Python, Java, Scala), make Spark one of the most popular projects in big data. The charts below show the amount of active development in Spark:

Apache Spark contributions

For the second year in a row, I’ve had the privilege of serving on the program committee for the Spark Summit. I’d like to highlight a few areas where Apache Spark is making inroads. I’ll focus on proposals2 from companies building applications on top of Spark.

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