Likelihood to Recommend Well suited: To most of the local run of datasets and non-prod systems - scalability is not a problem at all. Including data from multiple types of data sources is an added advantage. MLlib is a decently nice built-in library that can be used for most of the ML tasks. Less appropriate: We had to work on a RecSys where the music dataset that we used was around 300+Gb in size. We faced memory-based issues. Few times we also got memory errors. Also the MLlib library does not have support for advanced analytics and deep-learning frameworks support. Understanding the internals of the working of Apache Spark for beginners is highly not possible.
Read full review I find HDP easy to use and solves most of the problems for people looking to manage their big data. Evaluating the Hortonworks Data Platform is easy as it is free to download and install in your cluster. Single node cluster available as Sandbox is also easy for POCs.
Read full review Pros Apache Spark makes processing very large data sets possible. It handles these data sets in a fairly quick manner. Apache Spark does a fairly good job implementing machine learning models for larger data sets. Apache Spark seems to be a rapidly advancing software, with the new features making the software ever more straight-forward to use. Read full review It does a good job of packaging a lot of big data components into bundles and lets you use the ones you are interested in or need. It supports an extensive list of components which lets us solve many problems. It provides the ability to manage installations and maintenance using Apache Ambari. It helps us in using management packs to install/upgrade components easily. It also helps us add, remove components, add, remove hosts, perform upgrades in a convenient manner. It also provides alerts and notifications and monitors the environment. What they excel in is packaging open source components that are relevant and are useful to solve and complement each other as well as contribute to enhancing those components. They do a great job in the community to keep on top of what would be useful to users, fixing bugs and working with other companies and individuals to make the platform better. Read full review Cons Memory management. Very weak on that. PySpark not as robust as scala with spark. spark master HA is needed. Not as HA as it should be. Locality should not be a necessity, but does help improvement. But would prefer no locality Read full review Since it doesn't come with propriety tools for big data management, additional integration is need (for query handling, search, etc). It was very straightforward to store clinical data without relations, such as data from sensors of a medical device. But it has limitations when needed to combine the data with other clinical data in structured format (e.g. lab results, diagnosis). Overall look and feel of front-end management tools (e.g. monitoring) are not good. It is not bad but it doesn't look professional. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Capacity of computing data in cluster and fast speed.
Steven Li Senior Software Developer (Consultant)
Read full review Usability The only thing I dislike about spark's usability is the learning curve, there are many actions and transformations, however, its wide-range of uses for ETL processing, facility to integrate and it's multi-language support make this library a powerhouse for your data science solutions. It has especially aided us with its lightning-fast processing times.
Read full review Support Rating 1. It integrates very well with scala or python. 2. It's very easy to understand SQL interoperability. 3. Apache is way faster than the other competitive technologies. 4. The support from the Apache community is very huge for Spark. 5. Execution times are faster as compared to others. 6. There are a large number of forums available for Apache Spark. 7. The code availability for Apache Spark is simpler and easy to gain access to. 8. Many organizations use Apache Spark, so many solutions are available for existing applications.
Read full review Implementation Rating Try not to change variable names.
Read full review Alternatives Considered All the above systems work quite well on big data transformations whereas Spark really shines with its bigger API support and its ability to read from and write to multiple data sources. Using Spark one can easily switch between declarative versus imperative versus functional type programming easily based on the situation. Also it doesn't need special data ingestion or indexing pre-processing like
Presto . Combining it with Jupyter Notebooks (
https://github.com/jupyter-incubator/sparkmagic ), one can develop the Spark code in an interactive manner in Scala or Python
Read full review We chose [Hortonworks Data Platform] because it's free and because [it] was an IBM partner, suggested as big data platform after biginsights platform.
You can install in more physical computer without high specs, then you can use it in order to learn how to deploy, configure a complete big data cluster.
We installed also in a cloud infrastructure of 5 virtual machine
Read full review Return on Investment Faster turn around on feature development, we have seen a noticeable improvement in our agile development since using Spark. Easy adoption, having multiple departments use the same underlying technology even if the use cases are very different allows for more commonality amongst applications which definitely makes the operations team happy. Performance, we have been able to make some applications run over 20x faster since switching to Spark. This has saved us time, headaches, and operating costs. Read full review It is difficult to have a negative impact, because the required investment is not that high. The big open community behind Hortonworks and related Apache Project makes it easy to put 'the wheel to meet the road' quite quickly. We have seen management meetings where the attendants were impressed by the results achieved with the datalake built on HDP. Read full review ScreenShots