Spark is the darling of the open source community right now. It’s setting the Hadoop world on fire with its power and speed in large scale data processing on Hadoop clusters. Spark is one of the most active big data open source projects, has bunches of enthusiastic committers, has its own group of ecosystem applications, and is now part of most standard Hadoop distributions. Neat trick for a data processing framework that didn’t even start life as a Hadoop project.