Databricks CTO and Apache Spark creator Matei Zaharia explains the original design intent and operational limitations of Google's MapReduce architecture.
Insight
Zaharia: Data scientists prefer advanced work over answering routine user queries
“The interesting thing is nobody wants only the insiders to work with data, basically. Everyone wants to be able to access it directly. Actually, there was a great keynote about this at the Spark Summit by Gloria Lau, where she said that also the insiders thems…”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Zaharia: Apache Spark is the most active open-source data processing project
“It's actually the most active open source project in data processing in general as far as we can tell.”
Insight
Zaharia: Mentoring open-source contributors is slower initially but scales community
“At the beginning, you know, if you're someone working on it every day and someone comes in and wants help to, you know, to get some idea in, it's always faster for you to do it yourself than to help this other person. But you have to do that. You have to Help …”
Insight
Zaharia: Testing infrastructure is essential to maintain development speed in open source
“The third thing I need that's really important to keep a project moving quickly is just really great infrastructure for testing, checking the quality, making sure that it continues to be good. And by investing in this kind of infrastructure, much the same as y…”
Assertion Contradicted
Zaharia: Databricks includes all engine improvements in open-source Spark
“It's the same Spark that anyone else gets in the open source. All the libraries, all the improvements we put into the engine, you can just download them and run them yourselves. Or if you want you know, you can talk to a vendor that provides support. Support o…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Zaharia: Apache Spark is easier to use than prior big data systems
“So Spark is software for processing large volumes of data on a cluster, and the things that make it unique are, first of all, it has a very powerful programming model that lets you do many kinds of advanced analytics and processing, such as machine learning or…”