Apache Spark Certified Developer exams available online!

Complementing our on-going direct and partner-led Apache Spark training efforts, Databricks has teamed up with O'Reilly to offer the industry's first standard for measuring and validating a developer's expertise with Spark.

Databricks and O'Reilly are proud to announce the online availability of the Spark Certified Developer exams. You can now sign up and take the exam online here.

What is the Spark Certified Developer program?

Apache Spark is the most active project in the Big Data ecosystem and is fast becoming the open source alternative of choice for many enterprises. Spark provides enterprises with the scale and sophistication they require to gain insights from their Big Data by providing a unified framework for building data pipelines. Databricks was founded by the team that created and continues to lead both development and training around Spark, and Databricks Cloud, the cloud platform built around Spark to significantly simplify big data processing.

Behind this momentum, there is a growing need for Spark developers: developers who have both demonstrated expertise in how to implement best practices for Spark, and can help the enterprise build increasingly complex and sophisticated solutions on top of their Spark deployments. To address this growing demand for Spark developers and to complement our on-going direct and partner-led Spark training efforts, Databricks has teamed up with O'Reilly to offer the industry's first standard for measuring and validating a developer's expertise with Spark.

The first set of certification exams took place at the Strata Conference in Barcelona on November 20th 2014. In addition to our online certification, we also expect to run certification sessions at other upcoming conferences.

Why become a Spark Certified Developer?

As a Spark Certified Developer you will be able to:

• Demonstrate industry recognized validation for your expertise.
• Meet global standards required to ensure compatibility between Spark applications and distributions.
• Stay up to date with the latest advances and training in Spark.
• Become an integral part of the growing Spark developer community.

I'm interested! How to prepare for the exam?

You will take the test on your own computer under the supervision of a proctoring team.

The test is about 90-minutes in duration and includes a series of randomly generated questions covering all aspects of Spark. It will include some questions in Scala, Python, Java, and SQL, however, deep proficiency in any of those languages is not mandatory. Instead the questions will primarily focus on Spark and its computational model.

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.
• Already have some hands-on experience developing Spark applications in production environments.

Don't forget to sign up and take the exam online here.