The Apache Spark Certified Developer Program

More and more companies are using Apache Spark, and many Spark based pilots are currently deploying in production. In social media, at every big data conference or meetup, people describe new POC, prototypes, and production deployments using Spark.

Behind this momentum, a growing need for Spark developers is developing; people who have demonstrated expertise in how to implement best practices for Spark. People who can help the enterprise building increasingly complex and sophisticated solutions on top of their Spark deployments.

At Databricks, we get contacted by many enterprises looking for Spark resources to help with their next data-driven initiative. And so beyond our effort to train people on Spark directly or through partners all around the world, we have teamed up with O’Reilly for offering the first industry standard for measuring and validating a developer’s expertise on Spark.

Benefits of being a Spark Certified Developer

The Spark Developer Certification is the way for a developer to:

• Demonstrate recognized validation for your expertise
• Meet the global standards to ensure compatibility between Spark applications and distributions
• Stay up to date with the latest advances and training in Spark
• Be a part of the Spark developers community

The first set of exams have taken place at Strata Barcelona on November 20th 2014.

Shortly, developers will be able to take the exam online. We also expect to run certification sessions at other conferences.

How to prepare for the exam

You will take the test on your own computer, under the monitoring of a proctoring team. The test is about 90 minutes with a series of randomly generated questions covering all aspects of Spark.

The test will include questions in Scala, Python, Java, and SQL. However, deep proficiency in any of those languages is not required, since the questions focus on Spark and its model of computation.

To prepare for the Spark certification exam, we recommend that you:

• Are comfortable coding the advanced exercises in Spark Camp or related training (example exercises can be found here).
• Have mastered the material released so far in the O'Reilly book, Learning Spark
• Have some hands-on experience developing Spark apps in production already