Databricks, the company founded by the creators of Apache Spark that is revolutionizing what enterprises can do with Big Data, today announced the Databricks “Certified on Spark” Program for applications built on top of the Apache Spark platform. This program ensures that certified applications will work with a multitude of commercially supported Spark distributions.
“Pioneering application developers that are leveraging the power of Spark have had to choose between two sub-optimal choices: they either have to package Spark platform support with their application or attempt to maintain integration/certification individually with a rapidly increasing set of commercially supported Spark distributions,” said Ion Stoica, Databricks CEO. “The Databricks ‘Certified on Spark’ program enables developers to certify solely against the 100% open-source Apache Spark distribution, and ensures interoperability with Apache Spark-compatible distributions. Databricks will handle the task of certifying the compatibility of each commercial Spark distribution with the Apache version and will soon announce the initial set of distributions that meet this criteria.”
The pioneering partners of the Databricks certification program include Adatao, Alpine Data Labs, and Tresata – advanced analytics application vendors that have been at the forefront in leveraging the power of Spark to deliver faster and deeper insights for their enterprise customers.
“Certified on Spark” also provides multiple benefits for enterprise users including:
• Decoupling Spark distribution (and commercial support) from application licensing
• Full transparency into which applications are truly designed to work with and leverage the power of Spark
• A rapidly increasing set of certified applications to incentivize distribution vendors to maintain compatibility with Apache Spark and avoid forking and fragmentation, ultimately resulting in greater compatibility and shared innovation for users
“At Databricks we are fully committed to keeping Spark 100% open source and to bringing it to the widest possible set of users,” said Matei Zaharia, Databricks CTO and the creator of Spark. “The ‘Certified on Spark’ program is key to maintaining a healthy and unified Apache Spark platform, and it is an expression of our community focused efforts, such as organizing meetups and the upcoming Spark Summit, and driving the future of open-source development of Spark.”
Application developers that are interested in applying for the “Certified on Spark” program should visit www.databricks.com and select “Apply for Certification”. Enterprise users can also visit the Databricks site regularly to see the latest set of certified application vendors and read “application spotlight” blog articles that deep-dive into specific examples of Spark-powered applications.
