Installing and running Spark
Apache Spark is a distributed data processing engine that can handle both streams and batch data, and even graphs. It has a core set of components and other libraries that are used to add functionality. A common depiction of the Spark ecosystem is shown in the following diagram:
Figure 14.1 – The Apache Spark ecosystem
To run Spark as a cluster, you have several options. Spark can run in a standalone mode, which uses a simple cluster manager provided by Spark. It can also run on an Amazon EC2 instance, using YARN, Mesos, or Kubernetes. In a production environment with a significant workload, you would probably not want to run in standalone mode; however, this is how we will stand up our cluster in this chapter. The principles will be the same, but the standalone cluster provides the fastest way to get you up and running without needing to dive into more complicated infrastructure.
