Stratio kicked off its first Apache Spark meetups earlier this month. Our friends and members of other groups on meetup joined in when we announced the group in Madrid.
Only 2 weeks later we celebrated our first Spark meetup. The expectation was unusually high. We counted 101 members on the group, 50 RVSP’d, and 8 members on the waiting list. This surprised us because Spark only recently became an Apache project and it is yet to be widely known in the mainstream enterprise in the US, never mind in Europe.
This event was just a first gathering of people from mixed backgrounds sharing a common in technology.
We welcomed our attendees as pioneering Sparkanos. We also took the opportunity to break the premiere that Stratio had just certified its Spark platform by Databricks Inc. only that very week.
We also thanked the Fundación CIFF, the venue that hosted the meetup, and whose Master in Big Data will contribute to training analysts from this fall.
Alvaro Agea at Stratio delivers his personal view of the Spark project, from Stratio’s Eureka moment down to the 2nd edition of Spark Summit last month.
We surprised our attendees by starting a video conference with Pat McDonough streaming from the AmpLAB in California. Pat is Director, Client Solutions at Databricks, the company founded by the creators of Spark when employed at the AmpLAB, UC Berkeley.
We followed with the report of the Spark Summit in San Francisco earlier this month. David Morales and Paco Madrid of Stratio were at the conference (David as a speaker) and they shared their views of the event.
In December 2013 Mike Olson at Cloudera called for Spark to replace MapReduce as Hadoop’s standard processing. He went further at the Spark Summit hailing Spark as the new king in Big Data. These soundbites are part of the growing recognition that Spark enjoys in the industry.
The success of our meetup group is a testament to the energy and momentum of Spark, a project where Stratio is contributing. Sign up to meetup.com and join us. The next meetup will be denser in technical substance without missing the drinks afterward!
These and other meetups are the perfect warm-up for BDS14, the annual conference whose 3rd edition will take place in November. Stratio were Platinum sponsors of Big Data Spain and we will be part yet again of the conference in 2014. Stay tuned for the announcement of further news!.
