Is Apache Spark Too Costly? An Amazon Engineer Tells His Story

Is Apache Spark too costly? Amazon Principal Engineer Patrick Ames tackled this question during an interview with The New Stack Makers, sharing insights into transitioning from Spark to Ray for managing large-scale data. Ames, described as a "go-to" engineer for exabyte-scale projects, emphasized a goal-driven approach to solving complex engineering problems, from simplifying daily chores to optimizing software solutions. Initially, Spark was chosen at Amazon for its simplicity and open-source flexibility, allowing efficient merging of data with minimal SQL code. The team leveraged Spark in a decoupled architecture over S3 storage, scaling it to handle thousands of...