Course Overview

This high-octane Spark training course provides theoretical and technical aspects of Spark programming.  The course teaches developers Spark fundamentals, APIs, common programming idioms and more.

This Spark training course is supplemented by hands-on labs that help attendees reinforce their theoretical knowledge of the learned material and quickly get them up to speed on using Spark for data exploration.

Key Learning Areas

  • Elements of functional programming
  • Spark Shell
  • RDDs
  • Parallel processing in Spark
  • Spark SQL
  • ETL with Spark
  • MLib Machine Learning Library
  • Graph Processing with GraphX
  • Spark Streaming

Course Outline

Introduction to Functional Programming

  • What is Functional Programming (FP)?
  • Terminology: First-Class and Higher-Order Functions
  • Terminology: Lambda vs Closure
  • A Short List of Languages that Support FP
  • FP with Java
  • FP With JavaScript
  • Imperative Programming in JavaScript
  • The JavaScript map (FP) Example
  • The JavaScript reduce (FP) Example
  • Using reduce to Flatten an Array of Arrays (FP) Example
  • The JavaScript filter (FP) Example
  • Common High-Order Functions in Python
  • Common High-Order Functions in Scala
  • Elements of FP in R

Introduction to Apache Spark

  • What is Spark
  • A Short History of Spark
  • Where to Get Spark?
  • The Spark Platform
  • Spark Logo
  • Common Spark Use Cases
  • Languages Supported by Spark
  • Running Spark on a Cluster
  • The Driver Process
  • Spark Applications
  • Spark Shell
  • The spark-submit Tool
  • The spark-submit Tool Configuration
  • The Executor and Worker Processes
  • The Spark Application Architecture
  • Interfaces with Data Storage Systems
  • Limitations of Hadoop's MapReduce
  • Spark vs MapReduce
  • Spark as an Alternative to Apache Tez
  • The Resilient Distributed Dataset (RDD)
  • Spark Streaming (Micro-batching)
  • Spark SQL
  • Example of Spark SQL
  • Spark Machine Learning Library
  • GraphX
  • Spark vs R

Hadoop Distributed File System Overview

  • Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS)
  • HDFS High Availability
  • HDFS "Fine Print"
  • Storing Raw Data in HDFS
  • Hadoop Security
  • HDFS Rack-awareness
  • Data Blocks
  • Data Block Replication Example
  • HDFS NameNode Directory Diagram
  • Accessing HDFS
  • Examples of HDFS Commands
  • Other Supported File Systems
  • WebHDFS
  • Examples of WebHDFS Calls
  • Client Interactions with HDFS for the Read Operation
  • Read Operation Sequence Diagram
  • Client Interactions with HDFS for the Write Operation
  • Communication inside HDFS

The Spark Shell

  • The Spark Shell
  • The Spark Shell UI
  • Spark Shell Options
  • Getting Help
  • The Spark Context (sc) and SQL Context (sqlContext)
  • The Shell Spark Context
  • Loading Files
  • Saving Files
  • Basic Spark ETL Operations

Spark RDDs

  • The Resilient Distributed Dataset (RDD)
  • Ways to Create an RDD
  • Custom RDDs
  • Supported Data Types
  • RDD Operations
  • RDDs are Immutable
  • Spark Actions
  • RDD Transformations
  • Other RDD Operations
  • Chaining RDD Operations
  • RDD Lineage
  • The Big Picture
  • What May Go Wrong
  • Checkpointing RDDs
  • Local Checkpointing
  • Parallelized Collections
  • More on parallelize() Method
  • The Pair RDD
  • Where do I use Pair RDDs?
  • Example of Creating a Pair RDD with Map
  • Example of Creating a Pair RDD with keyBy
  • Miscellaneous Pair RDD Operations
  • RDD Caching
  • RDD Persistence
  • The Tachyon Storage

Shared Variables in Spark

  • Shared Variables in Spark
  • Broadcast Variables
  • Creating and Using Broadcast Variables
  • Example of Using Broadcast Variables
  • Accumulators
  • Creating and Using Accumulators
  • Example of Using Accumulators
  • Custom Accumulators

Parallel Data Processing with Spark

  • Running Spark on a Cluster
  • Spark Stand-alone Option
  • The High-Level Execution Flow in Stand-alone Spark Cluster
  • Data Partitioning
  • Data Partitioning Diagram
  • Single Local File System RDD Partitioning
  • Multiple File RDD Partitioning
  • Special Cases for Small-sized Files
  • Parallel Data Processing of Partitions
  • Spark Application, Jobs, and Tasks
  • Stages and Shuffles
  • The "Big Picture"

Introduction to Spark SQL

  • What is Spark SQL?
  • Uniform Data Access with Spark SQL
  • Hive Integration
  • Hive Interface
  • Integration with BI Tools
  • Spark SQL is No Longer Experimental Developer API!
  • What is a DataFrame?
  • The SQLContext Object
  • The SQLContext API
  • Changes Between Spark SQL 1.3 to 1.4
  • Example of Spark SQL (Scala Example)
  • Example of Working with a JSON File
  • Example of Working with a Parquet File
  • Using JDBC Sources
  • JDBC Connection Example
  • Performance & Scalability of Spark SQL

Graph Processing with GraphX

  • What is GraphX?
  • Supported Languages
  • Vertices and Edges
  • Graph Terminology
  • Example of Property Graph
  • The GraphX API
  • The GraphX Views
  • The Triplet View
  • Graph Algorithms
  • Graphs and RDDs
  • Constructing Graphs
  • Graph Operators
  • Example of Using GraphX Operators
  • GraphX Performance Optimization
  • The PageRank Algorithm
  • GraphX Support for PageRank

Machine Learning Algorithms

  • Supervised vs Unsupervised Machine Learning
  • Supervised Machine Learning Algorithms
  • Unsupervised Machine Learning Algorithms
  • Choose the Right Algorithm
  • Life-cycles of Machine Learning Development
  • Classifying with k-Nearest Neighbors (SL)
  • k-Nearest Neighbors Algorithm
  • k-Nearest Neighbors Algorithm
  • The Error Rate
  • Decision Trees (SL)
  • Random Forests
  • Unsupervised Learning Type: Clustering
  • K-Means Clustering (UL)
  • K-Means Clustering in a Nutshell
  • Regression Analysis
  • Logistic Regression

The Spark Machine Learning Library

  • What is MLlib?
  • Supported Languages
  • MLlib Packages
  • Dense and Sparse Vectors
  • Labeled Point
  • Python Example of Using the LabeledPoint Class
  • LIBSVM format
  • An Example of a LIBSVM File
  • Loading LIBSVM Files
  • Local Matrices
  • Example of Creating Matrices in MLlib
  • Distributed Matrices
  • Example of Using a Distributed Matrix
  • Classification and Regression Algorithm
  • Clustering

Spark Streaming

  • What is Spark Streaming?
  • Spark Streaming as Micro-batching
  • Use Cases
  • Some "Competition"
  • Spark Streaming Features
  • How It Works
  • Basic Data Stream Sources
  • Advanced Data Stream Sources
  • The DStream Object
  • DStream - RDD Diagram
  • The Operational DStream API
  • DStream Output Operations
  • The
  • StreamingContext Object
  • TCP Text Streams Example (in Scala)
  • Accessing the Underlying RDDs
  • The Sliding Window Concept
  • The Sliding Window Diagram
  • The Window Operations
  • A Windowed Computation Example (Scala)
  • Points to Remember
  • Other Points to Remember

Lab Exercises

Lab 1. Learning the Lab Environment
Lab 2. Elements of Functional Programming with Python
Lab 3. The Hadoop Distributed File System
Lab 4. Using the spark-submit Tool
Lab 5. The Spark Shell
Lab 6. RDD Performance Improvement Techniques
Lab 7. Spark ETL and HDFS Interface
Lab 8. Using Broadcast Variables
Lab 9. Using Accumulators
Lab 10. Common Map / Reduce Programs in Spark
Lab 11. Spark SQL
Lab 12. Getting Started with GraphX
Lab 13. PageRank with GraphX
Lab 14. Using Random Forests for Classification with Spark MLlib
Lab 15. Using k-means Algorithm from MLlib
Lab 16. Text Classification with Spark ML Pipeline
Lab 17. Spark Streaming: Part 1
Lab 18. Spark Streaming: Part 2

Who Benefits

Developers, Business Analysts, and IT Architects

Prerequisites

Participants should have the general knowledge of programming as well as experience working in Unix-like environments (e.g. running shell commands, etc.)