Apache Spark is an open-source, distributed processing system used for big data workloads. It utilizes in-memory caching and optimized query execution for fast queries against data of any size. Simply put, Spark is a fast and general engine for large-scale data processing.
- Resilient Distributed Dataset (RDD): RDD was the primary user-facing API in Spark since its inception. At the core, an RDD is an immutable distributed collection of elements of your data, partitioned across nodes in your cluster that can be operated in parallel with a low-level API that offers transformations and actions.