Databricks, the company founded by the team that created Apache® Spark™, announced the General Availability of Databricks Community Edition (DCE), a free version of the just-in-time data platform built on top of open source Apache Spark. DCE is accessible to all users today to learn Apache Spark quickly and easily with no infrastructure headaches. The announcement comes just four months after the beta launch of Databricks Community Edition at Spark Summit East in New York.
This year we’ve seen explosive growth for the Apache Spark project and all signs indicate the pace will only accelerate as the community expands even more,” said Matei Zaharia, cofounder and chief technology officer at Databricks. “Databricks Community Edition has created an ideal environment for learning Apache Spark. Developers of all backgrounds can now use Databricks Community Edition to learn Spark and mitigate the acute Spark skills gap.”
The Ideal Platform for Learning Apache Spark
Since the beta launch of Databricks Community Edition in February 2016, more than 8,000 users have registered for the free platform. Users have created over 61,000 notebooks in four different languages, including Python, Scala, SQL, and R. A survey conducted by Databricks of the DCE beta users identified that 60 percent of users were neither data scientists nor engineers, enabling a new category of people to learn Apache Spark, data science and data engineering skills.
A recent survey conducted by Stack Overflow, an online community for programmers, found that Apache Spark talent is in high demand. The General Availability of DCE will open up an ideal environment for users learning Spark, accelerate the growth and adoption of Spark, and enable new users to contribute to the community.
Today’s enterprises have an insatiable demand for data skills, which is exacerbated by the scarcity of qualified talent. Education is in Databricks’ DNA, and our birthplace at the UC Berkeley AMPLab gives the company significant experience in educating students and users. Databricks Community Edition augments that effort as a learning platform. More than 2,200 students have already taken courses using Databricks Community Edition since its beta release, and with its general availability, we expect widespread adoption by universities across the world,” said Ion Stoica, cofounder and executive chairman at Databricks.
Databricks Community Edition users will have access to a 6GB micro-cluster as well as a cluster manager and the notebook environment to prototype simple applications. As a learning tool, DCE comes with a rich portfolio of Apache Spark learning resources, including a set of award-winning Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) and sample notebooks.
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