Canonical announces supported solution for Apache Spark® on Kubernetes

17 October 2023 Today, Canonical announced the release of Charmed Spark – an advanced solution for Apache Spark^® that provides everything users need to run Apache Spark on Kubernetes.  Apache Spark is suitable for use in diverse data processing applications including predictive analytics, data warehousing, machine learning data preparation and extract-transform-load (ETL). Canonical Charmed Spark accelerates data engineering across public clouds and private data centres alike and comes with a comprehensive support and security maintenance offering, so teams can work with complete peace of mind.

“Enterprise data engineers want Apache Spark with the ease and long term security commitment of Ubuntu”, said Mark Shuttleworth, Chief Executive Officer at Canonical. “Charmed Spark is the first of many Canonical open source data solutions designed for reliability and multi-cloud operation. Every production deployment is warranted for ten years compliance and security maintenance”.

Cloud native with 10 years of support

Today’s Kubernetes infrastructure extensively depends on containerised images, but assuring image provenance of open source software can be challenging. The Charmed Spark OCI image, available on Github, is included in the solution. The entire solution is backed by the Ubuntu Pro enterprise support and security maintenance subscription – with up to 10 years of support available for the release.

Priced per node not per application

Charmed Spark is the first release of the forthcoming Canonical Data Fabric suite of data processing solutions for all sizes of data. Customers purchase 24/7 or weekday enterprise support on a per-node basis through the Ubuntu Pro + Support plan, which covers  all applications within the suite as well as additional solutions for AI offered by Canonical including Charmed Kubeflow and Charmed MLFlow.

Made for data engineers wherever they work

Charmed Spark is built to run Spark on Kubernetes, which brings cloud-native portability across clouds and on-premise data centres.  Charmed Spark delivers support for Apache Spark 3 with its improved Python integration and an even richer Spark-SQL featureset.

The included spark8t Python SDK and command line tooling simplifies working with Spark on Kubernetes, and can be conveniently installed via the provided spark-client Snap or as a Python package. The Spark container image, built on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, delivers an out-of-the-box runtime for creating Spark applications that run on Kubernetes clusters.

The spark-history-server-k8s operator enables administrators to quickly deploy, configure and operate the Spark History Server on a Kubernetes cluster using Juju – Canonical’s open source orchestration engine – either directly or with Terraform.

Getting started with Charmed Spark

Users can get started with Charmed Spark on Canonical Kubernetes and Amazon EKS by following the documentation at ubuntu.com/data/docs. Learn more at canonical.com/data/spark.

About Canonical

Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, provides open source security, support and services. Our portfolio covers critical systems, from the smallest devices to the largest clouds, from the kernel to containers, from databases to AI. With customers that include top tech brands, emerging startups, governments and home users, Canonical delivers trusted open source for everyone.