Databricks Community Edition Out for Everyone Now, Includes Spark Training
Earlier this year, Databricks came out with the beta release of Databricks Community Edition, a free version of its cloud-based Spark platform. Since then, Spark has been commanding everyone's attention, and now Databricks, which is the company founded by the team that created Apache Spark, has announced the General Availability of Databricks Community Edition (DCE), a free version of the just-in-time data platform built on top of Apache Spark, at Spark Summit 2016.
"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," the company noted.
"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 Spark skills gap is actually very real. Companies need workers experienced with Spark, and toward that end, Databricks has been promoting free Spark training.
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," Databricks claims.
"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 portfolio of Apache Spark learning resources, including a set of award-winning Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) and sample notebooks.
To learn more, read the Databricks blog post here: https://databricks.com/blog/2016/06/07/dce-ga.html