Changes/ApacheSpark

Apache Spark

Summary

Apache Spark is a fast and general engine for large-scale data processing. This change brings Spark to Fedora, allowing easy deployment and development of Spark applications on Fedora.

Owner

• Name: William Benton
• Email: willb@redhat.com
• Release notes owner:

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 21
• Last updated: 20 March 2014
• Tracker bug: #1084084

Detailed Description

Apache Spark is a fast and general engine for large-scale data processing. It supports developing custom analytic processing applications over large data sets or streaming data. Because it has the capability to cache intermediate results in cluster memory and schedule DAGs of computations, Spark programs can run up to 100x faster than equivalent Hadoop MapReduce jobs. Spark applications are easy to develop, parallel, fast, and resilient to failure, and they can operate on data from in-memory collections, local files, a Hadoop-compatible filesystem, or from a variety of streaming sources. Spark also includes libraries for distributed machine learning and graph algorithms.

Benefit to Fedora

Apache Spark is a tremendously exciting project and having it in Fedora makes Fedora a better platform for big data, machine learning, and analytics development, as well as for deploying and distributing these kinds of applications.

Scope

• Proposal owners: Currently our Spark package has been accepted into Fedora. It features nearly all of the functionality available from the upstream release. (The missing features -- specifically, Python bindings, the Spark REPL, Kryo-based serialization, primitives for approximate cardinalities of very large sets, and Mesos integration -- were missing from the initial packages due to unavailable dependencies and bundling issues; we're working to close the gap with upstream as quickly as possible.) This work depended upon Fedora 21's improved support for the Scala ecosystem.

• Other developers: N/A (not a System Wide Change)

• Release engineering: N/A (not a System Wide Change)

• Policies and guidelines: N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Upgrade/compatibility impact

N/A

How To Test

It should be possible to install Spark from Fedora repositories and develop and run applications against it. I can prepare a simple Fedora-specific example if necessary.

User Experience

Users will be able to develop and deploy applications based on Apache Spark in Fedora without relying on third-party software distributions.

Dependencies

This work partially motivated and was dependent upon Fedora 21's improved support for the Scala ecosystem, but the packages listed there are all complete and available in F21.

Contingency Plan

• Contingency mechanism: (What to do? Who will do it?) N/A (not a System Wide Change)
• Contingency deadline: N/A (not a System Wide Change)
• Blocks release? N/A (not a System Wide Change), Yes/No
• Blocks product? product <-- Applicable for Changes that blocks specific product release/Fedora.next -->

Documentation

N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Release Notes

Fedora 21 includes Apache Spark, a fast and general engine for large-scale data processing on clusters.