Spark: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 3. A Tour of Spark’s Toolset

In Chapter 2, we introduced Spark’s core concepts, like transformations and actions, in the context of Spark’s Structured APIs. These simple conceptual building blocks are the foundation of Apache Spark’s vast ecosystem of tools and libraries (Figure 3-1). Spark is composed of these primitives—the lower-level APIs and the Structured APIs—and then a series of standard libraries for additional functionality.

Figure 3-1. Spark’s toolset

Spark’s libraries support a variety of different tasks, from graph analysis and machine learning to streaming and integrations with a host of computing and storage systems. This chapter presents a whirlwind tour of much of what Spark has to offer, including some of the APIs we have not yet covered and a few of the main libraries. For each section, you will find more detailed information in other parts of this book; our purpose here is provide you with an overview of what’s possible.

This chapter covers the following:

• Running production applications with spark-submit

• Datasets: type-safe APIs for structured data

• Structured Streaming

• Machine learning and advanced analytics

• Resilient Distributed Datasets (RDD): Spark’s low level APIs

• SparkR

• The third-party package ecosystem

After you’ve taken the tour, you’ll be able to jump to the corresponding parts of the book to find answers to your questions ...