Databricks, the company behind Apache Spark, has announced the beta release of Databricks Community Edition, a free version of the cloud-based big data platform.
Introduced at the Spark Summit East conference, Databricks says the service will provide access to a micro-cluster as well as a cluster manager and notebook environment, making it easier for developers, data scientists, data engineers and other IT professionals to learn Spark.
First available as an invite-only beta rollout, accessibility to the Databricks Community Edition by the broader community will be made possible over the coming months, with general availability planned for late Q2 2016.
According to a survey recently conducted by Databricks of more than 1,400 respondents from the Spark community, Spark adoption is rapidly growing as IT professionals leverage the engine to make data processing easier and more accessible.
Databricks Community Edition comes with a portfolio of Spark training resources, including the MOOC, "Introduction to Big Data with Apache Spark," which has enrolled over 76,000 participants to date. Databricks will continue to develop Spark tutorials and training materials that will be directly accessible as part of Community Edition over time. Databricks Community Edition will enable users to transition their prototypes to production applications on the full Databricks platform.
For more information about the Databricks Community Edition, go to http://dbricks.co/join-dce-beta.