spark

by Mike Staszel

Installing Spark on Ubuntu in 3 Minutes

One thing I hear often from people starting out with Spark is that it’s too difficult to install. Some guides are for Spark 1.x and others are for 2.x. Some guides get really detailed with Hadoop versions, JAR files, and environment variables.

So here’s yet another guide on how to install Apache Spark, condensed and simplified to get you up and running with Apache Spark 2.3.1 in 3 minutes or less.

All you need is a machine (or instance, server, VPS, etc.) that you can install packages on (e.g. “sudo apt” works). If you need one of those, check out DigitalOcean. It’s much simpler than AWS for small projects.

First, log in to the machine via SSH.

Now, install OpenJDK 8 (Java):

sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y openjdk-8-jdk-headless python

Next, download and extract Apache Spark:

wget http://www-us.apache.org/dist/spark/spark-2.3.1/spark-2.3.1-bin-hadoop2.7.tgz && tar xf spark-2.3.1-bin-hadoop2.7.tgz

Set up environment variables to configure Spark:

echo 'SPARK_HOME=$HOME/spark-2.3.1-bin-hadoop2.7' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'PATH=$PATH:$SPARK_HOME/bin' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'export PYSPARK_PYTHON=python3' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

That’s it – you’re all set! You’ve installed Spark and it’s ready to go. Try out “pyspark”, “spark-submit” or “spark-shell”.

Try running this inside “pyspark” to validate that it worked:

spark.createDataFrame([{"hello": x} for x in range(1000)]).count() # hopefully this equals 1000
 
by Mike Staszel

Spark + Scala Boilerplate Project

After setting up a few Spark + Scala projects I decided to open-source a boilerplate sample project that you can import right into IntelliJ and build with one command.

Usually I write Apache Spark code in Python, but there are a few times I prefer to use Scala:

  • When functionality isn’t in PySpark yet.
  • It’s easier to include dependencies in the JAR file instead of installing on cluster nodes.
  • Need that extra bit of performance.
  • Even more reasons here on StackOverflow.

One of the downsides to using Scala over Python is setting up the initial project structure. With PySpark, a single “.py” file does the trick. Using this boilerplate project will make using Spark + Scala just as easy. Grab the code and run “sbt assembly” and you’ll have a JAR file ready to use with “spark-submit”.

Check it out here: https://github.com/mikestaszel/spark-scala-boilerplate

 
by Mike Staszel

Apache Spark on Google Colaboratory

Google recently launched a preview of Colaboratory, a new service that lets you edit and run IPython notebooks right from Google Drive – free! It’s similar to Databricks – give that a try if you’re looking for a better-supported way to run Spark in the cloud, launch clusters, and much more.

Google has published some tutorials showing how to use Tensorflow and various other Google APIs and tools on Colaboratory, but I wanted to try installing Apache Spark. It turned out to be much easier than I expected. Download the notebook and import it into Colaboratory or read on…

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by Mike Staszel

Jupyter Notebooks with PySpark on AWS EMR

One of the biggest, most time-consuming parts of data science is analysis and experimentation. One of the most popular tools to do so in a graphical, interactive environment is Jupyter.

Combining Jupyter with Apache Spark (through PySpark) merges two extremely powerful tools. AWS EMR lets you set up all of these tools with just a few clicks. In this tutorial I’ll walk through creating a cluster of machines running Spark with a Jupyter notebook sitting on top of it all.

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by Mike Staszel

Apache Spark Cluster with Vagrant

New tiny GitHub project: https://github.com/mikestaszel/spark_cluster_vagrant

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on benchmarking Spark as well as learning more about setting up clusters of Spark machines both locally and on cloud providers.

I decided to work on a simple Vagrantfile that spins up a Spark cluster with a head node and however many worker nodes desired. I’ve seen a few of these but they either used some 3rd party box, had an older version of Spark, or only spun up one node.

By running only one command I could have a fully-configured Spark cluster ready to use and test. Vagrant also easily extends beyond simple Virtualbox machines to many providers, including AWS EC2 and DigitalOcean and this Vagrantfile can be extended to provision clusters on those providers.

Check it out here: https://github.com/mikestaszel/spark_cluster_vagrant