Apache Spark vs. Java vs. PySpark vs. Spark Streaming Comparison Chart

Apache Spark™ is a unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing. Apache Spark achieves high performance for both batch and streaming data, using a state-of-the-art DAG scheduler, a query optimizer, and a physical execution engine. Spark offers over 80 high-level operators that make it easy to build parallel apps. And you can use it interactively from the Scala, Python, R, and SQL shells. Spark powers a stack of libraries including SQL and DataFrames, MLlib for machine learning, GraphX, and Spark Streaming. You can combine these libraries seamlessly in the same application. Spark runs on Hadoop, Apache Mesos, Kubernetes, standalone, or in the cloud. It can access diverse data sources. You can run Spark using its standalone cluster mode, on EC2, on Hadoop YARN, on Mesos, or on Kubernetes. Access data in HDFS, Alluxio, Apache Cassandra, Apache HBase, Apache Hive, and hundreds of other data sources.

PySpark is an interface for Apache Spark in Python. It not only allows you to write Spark applications using Python APIs, but also provides the PySpark shell for interactively analyzing your data in a distributed environment. PySpark supports most of Spark’s features such as Spark SQL, DataFrame, Streaming, MLlib (Machine Learning) and Spark Core. Spark SQL is a Spark module for structured data processing. It provides a programming abstraction called DataFrame and can also act as distributed SQL query engine. Running on top of Spark, the streaming feature in Apache Spark enables powerful interactive and analytical applications across both streaming and historical data, while inheriting Spark’s ease of use and fault tolerance characteristics.