Apache Spark vs. Azure Data Lake Storage

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Apache Spark
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
Apache Spark is a multi-language engine for executing data engineering, data science, and machine learning on single-node machines or clusters.N/A
Azure Data Lake Storage
Score 9.6 out of 10
N/A
Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 is a highly scalable and cost-effective data lake solution for big data analytics. It combines the power of a high-performance file system with massive scale and economy to help you speed your time to insight. Data Lake Storage Gen2 extends Azure Blob Storage capabilities and is optimized for analytics workloads.N/A
Pricing
Apache SparkAzure Data Lake Storage
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Apache SparkAzure Data Lake Storage
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Apache SparkAzure Data Lake Storage
Best Alternatives
Apache SparkAzure Data Lake Storage
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
Score 9.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Cloudera Manager
Cloudera Manager
Score 9.9 out of 10
Azure Blob Storage
Azure Blob Storage
Score 9.7 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Analytics Engine
IBM Analytics Engine
Score 7.1 out of 10
Azure Blob Storage
Azure Blob Storage
Score 9.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Apache SparkAzure Data Lake Storage
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.7
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Apache SparkAzure Data Lake Storage
Likelihood to Recommend
Apache Spark has rich APIs for regular data transformations or for ML workloads or for graph workloads, whereas other systems may not such a wide range of support. Choose it when you need to perform data transformations for big data as offline jobs, whereas use MongoDB-like distributed database systems for more realtime queries.
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Azure Data Lake storage is well suited for applications/use cases within organizations where capturing and storing large amounts of data in any format is required, primarily for storing and processing purposes. It's an easy and cost-effective cloud solution for your application data. The ability to integrate with other Azure Services like Azure Databricks and Azure Data Factory is superb.
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Pros
  • It performs a conventional disk-based process when the data sets are too large to fit into memory, which is very useful because, regardless of the size of the data, it is always possible to store them.
  • It has great speed and ability to join multiple types of databases and run different types of analysis applications. This functionality is super useful as it reduces work times
  • Apache Spark uses the data storage model of Hadoop and can be integrated with other big data frameworks such as HBase, MongoDB, and Cassandra. This is very useful because it is compatible with multiple frameworks that the company has, and thus allows us to unify all the processes.
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  • Azure Data Lake Storage is extremely scalable. It allows us to scale up or down endlessly based on what we need including replication.
  • In terms of security, Azure Data Lake Storage fits our requirements really well as we can monitor and encrypt seamlessly. We can also assign permissions through roles and grant network-level access.
  • Due to the fact that it can scale, we are able to monitor the cost of storage and any given time and make financial decisions about our infrastructure based on how small or big we want to scale.
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Cons
  • Memory management. Very weak on that.
  • PySpark not as robust as scala with spark.
  • spark master HA is needed. Not as HA as it should be.
  • Locality should not be a necessity, but does help improvement. But would prefer no locality
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  • I'd like to see a better cross-platform native client. Azure Data Explorer is fine, but it's far from the "SSMS" kind of experience SQL Server users are used to.
  • Listing a large number of file is somewhat problematic and slow. Using the native C# library, running directly on an Azure VM, it can take several hours to list just a couple million files.
  • Switching from V1 to V2 requires the creation of a new Storage Account and that's pretty inconvenient.
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Likelihood to Renew
Capacity of computing data in cluster and fast speed.
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Usability
If the team looking to use Apache Spark is not used to debug and tweak settings for jobs to ensure maximum optimizations, it can be frustrating. However, the documentation and the support of the community on the internet can help resolve most issues. Moreover, it is highly configurable and it integrates with different tools (eg: it can be used by dbt core), which increase the scenarios where it can be used
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Support Rating
1. It integrates very well with scala or python. 2. It's very easy to understand SQL interoperability. 3. Apache is way faster than the other competitive technologies. 4. The support from the Apache community is very huge for Spark. 5. Execution times are faster as compared to others. 6. There are a large number of forums available for Apache Spark. 7. The code availability for Apache Spark is simpler and easy to gain access to. 8. Many organizations use Apache Spark, so many solutions are available for existing applications.
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Alternatives Considered
We used Surprise Kit for one of the other research works. It is more fine-tuned to Recommendation systems and their algorithms. Apache Spark has MLlib for majority of ML problems. Where as software like Surprse Kit - it suitable for a specific task of Recommendations only
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The Azure Data Lake solution is designed for organizations that want to take advantage of big data. It provides a data platform that can help developers, data scientists, and analysts store data of any size and format and perform all types of processing and analytics across multiple platforms and programming languages. It can work with your existing solutions, such as identity management and security solutions. It also integrates with other data warehouses and cloud environments. It can be useful for organizations that need the above softwares.
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Return on Investment
  • Faster turn around on feature development, we have seen a noticeable improvement in our agile development since using Spark.
  • Easy adoption, having multiple departments use the same underlying technology even if the use cases are very different allows for more commonality amongst applications which definitely makes the operations team happy.
  • Performance, we have been able to make some applications run over 20x faster since switching to Spark. This has saved us time, headaches, and operating costs.
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  • The cost can be high for more advanced work. In some cases, for instance, time limits and lab runtimes may be too short if you are too slow to learn what is explained as you go along.
  • promote flexible team communication. You can create different spaces for different teams, and share files and tasks.
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