My team is trying to transition from Zeppelin to Jupyter for an application we've built, because Jupyter seems to have more momentum, more opportunities for customization, and be generally more flexible. However, there are a couple of things Zeppelin we haven't been able to equivalents for in Jupyter.
The main one is to have multi-lingual Spark support - is it possible in Jupyter to create a Spark data frame that's accessible via R, Scala, Python, and SQL, all within the same notebook? We've written a Scala Spark library to create data frames and hand them back to the user, and the user may want to use various languages to manipulate/interrogate the data frame once they get their hands on it.
Is Livy a solution to this in the Jupyter context, i.e. will it allow multiple connections (from the various language front-ends) to a common Spark back-end so they can manipulate the same data objects? I can't quite tell from Livy's web site whether a given connection only supports one language, or whether each session can have multiple connections to it.
If Livy isn't a good solution, can BeakerX fill this need? The BeakerX website says two of its main selling points are:
Polyglot magics and autotranslation, allowing you to access multiple languages in the same notebook, and seamlessly communicate between them;
Apache Spark integration including GUI configuration, status, progress, interrupt, and tables;
However, we haven't been able to use BeakerX to connect to anything other than a local Spark cluster, so we've been unable to verify how the polyglot implementation actually works. If we can get a connection to a Yarn cluster (e.g. an EMR cluster in AWS), would the polyglot support give us access to the same session using different languages?
Finally, if neither of those work, would a custom Magic work? Maybe something that would proxy requests through to other kernels, e.g. spark and pyspark and sparkr kernels? The problem I see with this approach is that I think each of those back-end kernels would have their own Spark context, but is there a way around that I'm not thinking of?
(I know SO questions aren't supposed to ask for opinions or recommendations, so what I'm really asking for here is whether a possible path to success actually exists for the three alternatives above, not necessarily which of them I should choose.)
Another possible is the SoS (Script of Scripts) polyglot notebook https://vatlab.github.io/sos-docs/index.html#documentation.
It supports multiple Jupyter kernels in one notebook. SoS has several natively supported languages (R, Ruby, Python 2 & 3, Matlab, SAS, etc). Scala is not supported natively, but it's possible to pass information to the Scala kernel and capture output. There's also a seemingly straightforward way to add a new language (already with a Jupyter kernel); see https://vatlab.github.io/sos-docs/doc/documentation/Language_Module.html
I am using Livy in my application. The way it works is any user can connect to a already established spark session using REST (asynchronous calls). We have a cluster on which Livy sends Scala code for execution. It is up to you whether you want to close the session after sending the scala code or not. If the session is open then any one having access can send Scala code once again to do further processing. I have not tried sending different languages in the same session created through Livy but I know that Livy supports 3 languages in interactive mode i.e. R, Python and Scala. So, theoretically you would be able to send code in any language for execution.
Hope it helps to some extent.
Related
A peer of mine has created code that opens a restful api web service within an interactive spark job. The intent of our company is to use his code as a means of extracting data from various datasources. He can get it to work on his machine with a local instance of spark. He insists that this is a good idea and it is my job as DevOps to implement it with Azure Databricks.
As I understand it interactive jobs are for one-time analytics inquiries and for the development of non-interactive jobs to be run solely as ETL/ELT work between data sources. There is of course the added problem of determining the endpoint for the service binding within the spark cluster.
But I'm new to spark and I have scarcely delved into the mountain of documentation that exists for all the implementations of spark. Is what he's trying to do a good idea? Is it even possible?
The web-service would need to act as a Spark Driver. Just like you'd run spark-shell, run some commands , and then use collect() methods to bring all data to be shown in the local environment, that all runs in a singular JVM environment. It would submit executors to a remote Spark cluster, then bring the data back over the network. Apache Livy is one existing implementation for a REST Spark submission server.
It can be done, but depending on the process, it would be very asynchronous, and it is not suggested for large datasets, which Spark is meant for. Depending on the data that you need (e.g. highly using SparkSQL), it'd be better to query a database directly.
First of all my agenda is to be able to use spark codes inside jupyterhub. In other words I want to connect a remote spark cluster to jupyterhub. After searching about it I came up with two solutions:1)Livy and 2)spark magic. I have tried Livy but since it doesn't support spark version 3 I have put that one aside, also another way we considered was via spark magic but we couldn't install or even find a good documentation about it.
what came into our minds was somehow merge the two image of spark and jupyterhub together to gain what we need.
Does anyone have any idea how it can be done or a better suggestion?
Even a good documentation about spark magic that we can use would be wonderful.
thank you for your help.
When writing an Application in Scala using Spark, when ran, is it a regular Scala application which "delegates the spark jobs to the spark cluster" and gets the desired results back ?
Or does it get completely compiled to something special consumed by a "spark engine" ?
It depends on the "deploy mode"
If you use local mode, then all actions occur locally, and you don't get any benefits from distribution that Spark is meant for. While it can be used to abstract different libraries and provide clean ways to process data via dataframes or ML, it's not really intended to be used like that
Instead, you can use cluster mode, in which your app just defines the steps to take, and then when submitted, everything happens in the remote cluster. In order to process data back in the driver, you need to use methods such as collect(), or otherwise download the results from remote file systems/databases
I want to submit spark python applications from my laptop. I have a standalone spark cluster, and the master is running at some visible IP (MASTER_IP). After downloading and unzipping Spark on my laptop, I got this to work
./bin/spark-submit --master spark://MASTER_IP:7077 ~/PATHTO/pi.py
From what I understand, it is defaulting to client mode (vs cluster mode). According to Spark (http://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/submitting-applications.html) -
"only YARN supports cluster mode for Python applications." Since I'm not using YARN, I must use client mode.
My question is - do I need to download all of Spark on my laptop? Or just a few libraries?
I want to allow the rest of my team to use my Spark cluster, but I want them to do the least amount of work as possible. They don't need to setup a cluster. They only need to submit jobs to it. Having them downloading all of Spark seems like overkill.
So, what exactly is the minimum that they need?
The spark-1.5.0-bin-hadoop2.6 package I have here is 304MB unpacked. More than half, 175MB is made up of spark-assembly-1.5.0-hadoop2.6.0.jar, the main Spark stuff. You can't get rid of this unless you want to compile your own package maybe. A large part of the rest is spark-examples-1.5.0-hadoop2.6.0.jar, 113MB. Removing this and zipping back up is harmless and saves you a lot already.
However, using some tools such that they don't have to work with the spark package directly, like spark-jobserver (never used but never heard somebody very positive about the current state) or spark-kernel (needs your own code still to interface with it, or when used with notebook (see below) limited compared to alternatives) as suggested by Reactormonk makes it even easier for them.
A popular thing to do in that sense is set up access to a notebook. As you're using Python, IPython with a PySpark profile would be most straightforward to set up. Other alternatives are Zeppelin and spark-notebook (my favourite) for using Scala.
Firstly, I need to admit that I am new to Bluemix and Spark. I just want to try out my hands with Bluemix Spark service.
I want to perform a batch operation over, say, a billion records in a text file, then I want to process these records with my own set of Java APIs.
This is where I want to use the Spark service to enable faster processing of the dataset.
Here are my questions:
Can I call Java code from Python? As I understand it, presently only Python boilerplate is supported? There are few a pieces of JNI as well beneath my Java API.
Can I perform the batch operation with the Bluemix Spark service or it is just for interactive purposes?
Can I create something like a pipeline (output of one stage goes to another) with Bluemix, do I need to code for it ?
I will appreciate any and all help coming my way with respect to above queries.
Look forward to some expert advice here.
Thanks.
The IBM Analytics for Apache Spark sevices is now available and it allow you to submit a java code/batch program with spark-submit along with notebook interface for both python/scala.
Earlier, the beta code was limited to notebook interactive interface.
Regards
Anup