Will the New Spark Course from MapR Lead to a Spark Certification?

All things Big Data-related are hot, hot, hot in IT and software development circles nowadays. That's why I found myself posing the question that serves as this week's title as soon as I read the announcement that MapR is now offering a free Apache Spark class online.

The class is being offered as part of MapR's new, emerging series of Hadoop On-Demand Training offerings. MapR already offers administrator and developer certs aimed at Big Data, so it's not much of a stretch to see a new potential topic making itself known here.

For those who don't already know, MapR has been active in the Big Data space for some time now. They have been considered a leader in providing a stable, commercial grade Hadoop distribution with support and services to match since the early part of this decade.

The company offers both private and multitenant "enterprise Hadoop" versions that run on major cloud environments including AWS, the Google Compute Engine, and the OpenStack environment (through a partnership with Canonical), as well as in private data centers.

Much of MapR's strategy has been attemptg to raise consciousness inside the industry and provide education, which explains why the company's certifications have also gained plenty of traction.

Currently, MapR offers three different certifications through its MapR Academy Arm:

? MCHA (MapR Certified Hadoop Administrator): demonstrates proficiency in administering Hadoop Clusters and in working with MapR administration tools.
? MCHD (MapR Certified Hadoop Developer):demonstrates proficiency in designing and developing MapReduce/YARN programs for use with Hadoop.
? MDHBD (MapR Certified HBase Developer): demonstrates proficiency in building HBase programs that use HBase as a distributed NoSQL datastore.

The company's On-Demand Online Training offerings currently include 19 elements, including 16 courses and the certification exams for the three aforementioned credentials. Their free Apache Spark Essentials course, coupled with the raging levels of interest and buzz around this technology of late in Big Data circles, is what got me thinking about a possible new element in the MapR cert collection.

Keep your eye on this topic, and be sure to check out the MapR offerings: There's a lot of interesting stuff going on in here, particularly for those with Big Data proclivities.