Here is a link to Ali Ghodsi’s talk and demo that took the Spark Summit by storm. The demo really captures the power of Databricks Cloud: complex, high-performance, big data analytics at massive scale, accessible to anyone who can write simple scripts (currently supports SQL, Python, Scala).
The demo culminates when Ali shows how easy it is to build a dashboard, that uses streaming data (Twitter) and filter it via machine learning. Databricks Cloud confirms that Apache Spark is a great platform for building data products. Moreover, Databricks Cloud makes it much, much easier to build interesting data products. As Ali notes at the start of his demo, the philosophy behind Databricks Cloud is encapsulated in the following quote:
“Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible” (Allan Kay)
If you’re interested in data science or data engineering, the demo is well worth watching.
[Full disclosure: I’m an advisor to Databricks.]