Apache Spark is an open-source distributed data processing engine used to run large-scale batch processing, SQL analytics, stream processing, and machine learning workloads across clusters. In cloud environments, it is commonly deployed as a managed service or on Kubernetes to process data stored in object storage, data lakes, and distributed file systems with high parallelism and in-memory execution.
A retail company runs Apache Spark on Amazon EMR to transform terabytes of clickstream logs in Amazon S3 each night, generating curated datasets for dashboards and machine learning models.