Spark has evolved considerably since the early days. Few new applications today use the Resilient Distributed Dataset (RDD), which have largely been replaced by DataFrames. In concert with the shift ...

The Apache Spark community has improved support for Python to such a great degree over the past few years that Python is now a “first-class” language, and ...

Spark also provides many language choices, including Scala, Java, Python, and R. The 2015 Spark Survey that polled the Spark community shows particularly rapid growth in Python and R.

But Spark has also had its share of impedance mismatch issues, such as making R and Python programs first-class citizens, or adapting to more compute-intensive processing of AI models.

AWS Glue, a serverless data integration service provided by Amazon Web Services, showcases Python and Apache Spark capabilities in a version 4.0 release introduced this week. The upgrade adds ...