How to Work with Avro, Kafka, and Schema Registry in Databricks
In the previous blog post, we introduced the new built-in Apache Avro data source in Apache Spark and explained how you can use it to build streaming data pipelines with the from_avro and to_avro functions. Apache Kafka and Apache Avro are commonly used to build a scalable and near-real-time data pipeline. In this blog post,...
Accelerating Machine Learning on Databricks: On-Demand Webinar and FAQ Now Available!
On January 15th, we hosted a live webinar—Accelerating Machine Learning on Databricks—with Adam Conway, VP of Product Management, Machine Learning, at Databricks and Hossein Falaki, Software Development Engineer and Data Scientist at Databricks. In this webinar, we covered some of the latest innovations brought into the Databricks Unified Analytics Platform for Machine Learning. In particular,...
Kicking Off 2019 with an MLflow User Survey
It’s been six months since we launched MLflow, an open source platform to manage the machine learning lifecycle, and the project has been moving quickly since then. MLflow fills a role that hasn’t been served well in the open source community so far: managing the development lifecycle for ML, including tracking experiments and metrics, building...
MLflow v0.8.1 Features Faster Experiment UI and Enhanced Python Model
MLflow v0.8.1 was released this week. It introduces several UI enhancements, including faster load times for thousands of runs and improved responsiveness when navigating runs with many metrics and parameters. Additionally, it expands support for evaluating Python models as Apache Spark UDFs and automatically captures model dependencies as Conda environments. Now available on PyPI and...
Introducing Built-in Image Data Source in Apache Spark 2.4
Introduction With recent advances in deep learning frameworks for image classification and object detection, the demand for standard image processing in Apache Spark has never been greater. Image handling and preprocessing have their specific challenges - for example, images come in different formats (eg., jpeg, png, etc.), sizes, and color schemes, and there is no...
Apache Avro as a Built-in Data Source in Apache Spark 2.4
Apache Avro is a popular data serialization format. It is widely used in the Apache Spark and Apache Hadoop ecosystem, especially for Kafka-based data pipelines. Starting from Apache Spark 2.4 release, Spark provides built-in support for reading and writing Avro data. The new built-in spark-avro module is originally from Databricks’ open source project Avro Data...
Introducing Databricks Runtime 5.0 for Machine Learning
Six months ago we introduced the Databricks Runtime for Machine Learning with the goal of making machine learning performant and easy on the Databricks Unified Analytics Platform. The Databricks Runtime for ML comes pre-packaged with many ML frameworks and enables distributed training and inference. Today we are excited to release the second iteration including Conda...
Applying your Convolutional Neural Network: On-Demand Webinar and FAQ Now Available!
On October 25th, we hosted a live webinar—Applying your Convolutional Neural Network—with Denny Lee, Technical Product Marketing Manager at Databricks. This is the third webinar of a free deep learning fundamental series from Databricks. In this webinar, we dived deeper into Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), a particular type of neural networks that assume that inputs...
Introducing Apache Spark 2.4
UPDATED: 11/19/2018 We are excited to announce the availability of Apache Spark 2.4 on Databricks as part of the Databricks Runtime 5.0. We want to thank the Apache Spark community for all their valuable contributions to the Spark 2.4 release. Continuing with the objectives to make Spark faster, easier, and smarter, Spark 2.4 extends its...
Democratizing Cloud Infrastructure with Terraform and Jenkins
This blog post is part of our series of internal engineering blogs on the Databricks platform, infrastructure management, integration, tooling, monitoring, and provisioning. This summer at Databricks I designed and implemented a service for coordinating and deploying cloud provider infrastructure resources that significantly improved the velocity of operations on our self-managed cloud platform. The service...