Databricks, the company founded by the creators of the popular open-source Big Data processing engine Apache Spark, and O’Reilly Media , a leading voice in Data Science, has announced the launch of the first, global Apache Spark Developer Certification program. Databricks’ Spark experts and O’Reilly’s editorial team are creating a program – consisting of a formal exam and subsequent certification – that establishes the industry standard for measuring and validating Spark technical expertise. As enterprises increasingly focus on turning data into value, Certified Spark developers can help them take advantage of Spark’s combination of sophisticated analytics and blazing speed to deliver deeper insights, faster.
The Databricks/O’Reilly certification program augments Databricks’ efforts to grow the Spark community and enable the ecosystem that is a critical component of all successful platforms. Recent Databricks initiatives have included the ‘Certified on Spark’ and ‘Certified Spark Distribution’ programs designed to ensure compatibility between Spark applications and distributions, a long-running and rapidly expanding training program, and events such as the Spark Summit which brought together over 1000 members of the community. The Databricks team, which spun out of UC Berkeley’s AMPLab after creating Apache Spark, remains the major driving force behind Spark, and Databricks provides the expertise and backend support that powers enterprise Spark offerings from major Big Data vendors such as Cloudera, MapR, and Datastax.
O’Reilly has a rich history of working directly with the originators of technologies we believe in, and this new Spark Certification program continues that tradition,” said Ben Lorica, O’Reilly’s Director of Content for Data. “I’m delighted to be partnering with the creators of Spark to build a program that defines the state of the art and helps developers and companies keep pace with the latest innovations in the big data space.”
While specific reasons for enterprise adoption of Spark vary – speed and efficiency, ease of use, single unified system for entire data pipelines – the uptake has been unmistakable. Spark is the most active project in the Big Data system, part of all major Hadoop vendors’ distributions – as well as many non-Hadoop vendors – and has been deployed in production by enterprises across multiple verticals, including telecommunications, retail, financial services, public sector, and media companies.
The adoption of Apache Spark by businesses large and small is growing at an incredible rate across a wide range of industries, and the demand for developers with certified expertise is quickly following suit,” said John Tripier, Alliances and Ecosystem Lead at Databricks. “To meet that demand, in addition to our existing Spark training resources, we’re excited to partner with O’Reilly in the launch of the Spark Developer Certification program to encourage and further grow the community of Spark developers building next-generation Big Data applications.”
Spark Developer Certification will formally launch and be available at O’Reilly’s upcoming Strata Conference + Hadoop World in New York, October 15-17. For more information: http://oreilly.com/go/sparkcert
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