Speed
Run programs up to 100x faster than Hadoop MapReduce in memory, or 10x faster on disk.
Spark has an advanced DAG execution engine that supports cyclic data flow and in-memory computing.
Ease of Use
Write applications quickly in Java, Scala or Python.
Spark offers over 80 high-level operators that make it easy to build parallel apps. And you can use it interactively from the Scala and Python shells.
file.flatMap(lambda line: line.split())
.map(lambda word: (word, 1))
.reduceByKey(lambda a, b: a+b)
Generality
Combine SQL, streaming, and complex analytics.
Spark powers a stack of high-level tools including Shark for SQL, MLlib for machine learning, GraphX, and Spark Streaming. You can combine these frameworks seamlessly in the same application.
Integrated with Hadoop
Spark can run on Hadoop 2's YARN cluster manager, and can read any existing Hadoop data.
If you have a Hadoop 2 cluster, you can run Spark without any installation needed. Otherwise, Spark is easy to run standalone or on EC2 or Mesos. It can read from HDFS, HBase, Cassandra, and any Hadoop data source.
