I first heard of Spark in late 2013 when I became interested in Scala, the language in which Spark is written. Some time later, I did a fun data science project trying to predict survival on the Titanic. This turned out to be a great way to get further introduced to Spark concepts and programming. I highly recommend it for any aspiring Spark developers looking for a place to get started.
Today, Spark is being adopted by major players like Amazon, eBay, and Yahoo! Many organizations run Spark on clusters with thousands of nodes. According to the Spark FAQ, the largest known cluster has over 8000 nodes. Indeed, Spark is a technology well worth taking note of and learning about.
This article provides an introduction to Spark including use cases and examples. It contains information from the Apache Spark website as well as the book Learning Spark – Lightning-Fast Big Data Analysis.