Databricks, O'Reilly Announce Apache Spark Certification Training

Yet another certification program for Big Data and the cloud has entered the fray. But this one, offered by Databricks and O'Reilly Media, is the first for developers working with Apache Spark, the open source Big Data processing engine.

Demand for technical expertise with Apache Spark, a data analytics framework for clusters that provides much better performance for certain Big Data applications than the other big name in open source data processing, Hadoop MapReduce, is rising among enterprises, the companies say. And as the major commercial organization behind Spark development, Databricks hopes to provide a certification program to help business identiy Spark developers who "can help them take advantage of Spark’s combination of sophisticated analytics and blazing speed to deliver deeper insights, faster," it said in a statement.

The announcement is also clearly aimed at expanding the Spark ecosystem and making Spark a core part of Big Data applications. "Spark is the most active project in the Big Data system," Databricks and O'Reilly contend, and forms "part of all major Hadoop vendors' distributions—as well as many non-Hadoop vendors." It also "has been deployed in production by enterprises across multiple verticals, including telecommunications, retail, financial services, public sector and media companies."

John Tripier, Alliances and Ecosystem lead at Databricks, adds, "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. 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."

The certification program, which is based around a formal exam, will officially launch during O'Reilly's Strata Conference + Hadoop World in New York, which runs Oct. 15-17.