Playing well together: Big data beyond the JVM with Spark and friends

Holden Karau and Rachel Warren explore the state of the current big data ecosystem and explain how to best work with it in non-JVM languages. While much of the focus will be on Python + Spark, the talk will also include interesting anecdotes about how these lessons apply to other systems (including Kafka).

Many of the recent big data systems, like Hadoop, Spark, and Kafka, are written primarily in JVM languages. At the same time, there is a wealth of tools for data science and data analytics that exist outside of the JVM. Holden Karau and Rachel Warren explore the state of the current big data ecosystem and explain how to best work with it in non-JVM languages. While much of the focus will be on Python + Spark, the talk will also include interesting anecdotes about how these lessons apply to other systems (including Kafka). Holden and Rachel detail how to bridge the gap using PySpark and discuss other solutions like Kafka Streams as well. They also outline the challenges of pure Python solutions like dask. Holden and Rachel start with the current architecture of PySpark and its evolution. They then turn to the future, covering Arrow-accelerated interchange for Python functions, how to expose Python machine learning models into Spark, and how to use systems like Spark to accelerate training of traditional Python models. They also dive into what other similar systems are doing as well as what the options are for (almost) completely ignoring the JVM in the big data space. Python users will learn how to more effectively use systems like Spark and understand how the design is changing. JVM developers will gain an understanding of how to Python code from data scientist and Python developers while avoiding the traditional trap of needing to rewrite everything.