It's a Wrap! A Lookback at Spark Summit in Amsterdam

The Databricks team would like to thank the Apache Spark community and our partners for making the inaugural Spark Summit EU 2015 a great success! The Summit was a sold out event with close to 930 attendees from over 40 countries and 330 companies. Amongst the attendees, over 400 individuals took part in three different training courses in topics ranging from Spark fundamentals to data science.

The excitement, momentum, and energy was unmistakable. It goes without saying that we are fortunate to have the best developers, engineers, and partners taking this journey with us.

Day 1 Highlights

What a way to kick off Spark Summit EU 2015 - Matei Zaharia, the creator of Spark gave an inspiring keynote on the evolution of Spark over the past year. Picking up on the theme of evolution, the CEO of Databricks - Ion Stoica - shared a vision of Spark becoming the unifying force behind data sources and data processing in the Enterprise. The other keynotes echoed Ion’s sentiment, a notable example is from Goldman Sachs on how Spark is playing an increasingly important role within their organization.

Slides from the keynotes and a sample of the talks from Day 1:

• Matei Zaharia, Co-Founder & CTO, Databricks: How Spark Usage is Evolving in 2015
• Ion Stoica, Co-Founder & CEO, Databricks: Revolutionizing Big Data in the Enterprise with Spark
• Hossein Falaki, Software Engineer, Databricks: Sentiment Analysis Demo (and Notebooks)
• Anjul Bhambhri, Vice President of Big Data, IBM: Apache Spark: The Analytics Operating System
• Vincent Saulys, Vice President, Goldman Sachs: How Spark is Making an Impact at Goldman Sachs
• Michael Armbrust, Software Engineer, Databricks: Spark DataFrames: Simple and Fast Analysis of Structured Data (code referred to in his slides are hosted here)
• Aaron Davidson, Software Engineer, Databricks: Spark in Production: Lessons From 100+ Production Users

Day 2 Highlights

On the second day, keynote speakers dove into the different facets of the diverse Spark ecosystem. Day 2’s sessions further reinforced the momentum and commitment of the growing community.

Slides from the keynotes and a sample of the talks from Day 2:

• Martin Odersky, Chief Architect, Typesafe: Spark—The Ultimate Scala Collections
• Alan Saldich, Vice President of Marketing, Cloudera: Spark in the Enterprise: Two Years Later
• Reynold Xin, Co-Founder, Databricks: A Look Ahead at Spark's Development
• Patrick McFadin, Chief Evangelist, DataStax: Spark and Cassandra: An Amazing Apache Love Story
• Arun Murthy, Founder, Hortonworks: Spark and Hadoop Perfect Together
• Andrew Or, Software Engineer, Databricks: SparkUI Visualization: A Lens into Your Application (Notebook #1, Notebook #2, Notebook #3)
• Hossein Falaki, Software Engineer, Databricks: Enabling Exploratory Data Science with Spark and R (Notebook)
• Joseph Bradley, Software Engineer, Databricks: Combining the Strengths of MLlib, scikit-learn, and R (Notebook #1, Notebook #2, Notebook #3, Notebook #4)

The video and slides from the event has been posted on the Spark Summit website.

The next Summit is already rapidly approaching – the call for presentations for Spark Summit in New York City (Feb 16-18, 2016) is already open. Submit your ideas now!