Finally the book I wrote at the first time in my life has been published today. It is the first chance to write a published book written on paper. I’m amazed at the fact that I can complete to write a book in English though I’m not an native English speaker. Of course it is not totally owe to myself. I cannot say thank you enough to editors and publishers who did proofreading, spell check, grammar check and fixed all foolish mistakes I made.
The initial trigger to write the book was an email from a publisher at Bleeding Edge Press. She seemed to check my GitHub account and contributions toward Spark repository. There are some other authors of this book. They are all professional of distributed system and Spark from around the world. It could somewhat relieve me, otherwise it might be difficult for me to complete a whole book. We had hangout sometimes and converge the theme and contents to be written in the book.
This book titled “Spark: Big Data Cluster Computing in Production” was written about Apache Spark which is a fast and general distributed engine developed as an open source project. Although there are already some books about Spark, we wrote the book to share the knowledge to operate Spark in production. Some is about internal design of Spark, others are for ecosystem libraries around Spark. So we hope that the book is read by engineers who maintain Spark cluster in their daily work and who want to know how to make Spark cluster more fast and stable. The chapter I wrote was about security and ecosystem libraries. Especially what I wanted to do was introducing various kind of ecosystem libraries around Spark. Thanks to Spark flexibility, some type of workload which was difficult in existing distributed framework can be easily executed. I think this flexibility is the potential of Spark and the reason why Spark is widely adapted. This was what I wanted to share.
So I was glad to get the chance to write about one of the growing field of distributed computing. It must be a good experience as an software engineer focusing on the area. Last but not least, I want to say thank you to the co-authors, Ilya Ganelin, Ema Orhian, Brennon York. In addition, there are a lot of cooperation from Yu Ishikawa and Yuichi Tanaka. Thank you again to them. I realized a book can be achieved on a lot of cooperation and effort around the world even if they cannot see each other face to face. It was very impressive experience for me.
I hope this book stimulate the heart and brain of readers.