Databricks, a company founded by the creators of the popular open-source Big Data processing engine Apache Spark, is a firm that you may not have heard much from in 2014, but you will throughout 2015. The company has healthy venture funding of $47 million, and Andreesen Horowitz is one of the investors, with Ben Horowitz on board.
Folks in the Big Data and Hadoop communities are becoming increasingly interested in Apache Spark, an open source processing engine for Hadoop data built for speed and advanced analytics. It was developed in 2009 in UC Berkeley’s AMPLab, and open sourced in 2010. Now, Databricks has announced the launch of two massive open online courses (MOOCs) focused on distributed analytics using Spark. The courses will be made available in Spring 2015 via BerkeleyX, in collaboration with the MOOC provider and online learning platform, edX.
The two five-week courses are designed to augment Databricks’ efforts to grow the Spark community. They provide students with hands-on experience with Spark’s analytics and real-time capabilities to deliver insights into data. The launch of these courses comes on the heels of a series of Apache Spark training offerings from Databricks, including the Spark Certification Program for System Integrators and the Spark Certification Program for Developers.
