Apache Spark is a multi-language engine for executing data engineering, data science, and machine learning on single-node machines or clusters.

If you’d like to build Spark from source, visit Building Spark. Spark runs on both Windows and UNIX-like systems (e.g. Linux, Mac OS), and it should run on any platform that runs a supported version of Java.

The documentation linked to above covers getting started with Spark, as well the built-in components MLlib, Spark Streaming, and GraphX. In addition, this page lists other resources for learning Spark.

To follow along with this guide, first, download a packaged release of Spark from the Spark website. Since we won’t be using HDFS, you can download a package for any version of Hadoop.

Spark SQL is a Spark module for structured data processing. Unlike the basic Spark RDD API, the interfaces provided by Spark SQL provide Spark with more information about the structure of both …

There are more guides shared with other languages such as Quick Start in Programming Guides at the Spark documentation. There are live notebooks where you can try PySpark out without any other step:

Check out the guide on migrating from Spark JVM to Spark Connect to learn more about how to write code that works with Spark Connect. Also, check out how to build Spark Connect custom extensions …

Structured Streaming is a scalable and fault-tolerant stream processing engine built on the Spark SQL engine. You can express your streaming computation the same way you would express a batch …

Jan 11, 2026 · We’re proud to announce the release of Spark 0.7.0, a new major version of Spark that adds several key features, including a Python API for Spark and an alpha of Spark Streaming.

You can run Spark using its standalone cluster mode, on EC2, on Hadoop YARN, on Mesos, or on Kubernetes. Access data in HDFS, Apache Cassandra, Apache HBase, Apache Hive, and hundreds …