This is not an officially supported Google product.

1. Project Status
2. Prerequisites
3. Documentation
4. Overview
5. Features

Project status: alpha

Spark Operator is still under active development and has not been extensively tested yet. Use at your own risk. Backward-compatibility is not supported for alpha releases.

Customization of Spark pods, e.g., mounting ConfigMaps and PersistentVolumes is currently experimental and implemented using a Kubernetes Initializer, which is a Kubernetes alpha feature and requires a Kubernetes cluster with alpha features enabled. The Initializer can be disabled if there's no need for pod customization or if running on an alpha cluster is not desirable. Check out the Quick Start Guide on how to disable the Initializer.

• Version >= 1.8 of Kubernetes.

Spark Operator relies on garbage collection support for custom resources and optionally the Initializers which are in Kubernetes 1.8+.

Due to this bug in Kubernetes 1.9 and earlier, CRD objects with escaped quotes (e.g., spark.ui.port\") in map keys can cause serialization problems in the API server. So please pay extra attention to make sure no offending escaping is in your SparkAppliction CRD objects, particularly if you use Kubernetes prior to 1.10.

• Design
• API Specification
• Quick Start Guide
• User Guide
• User Guide of sparkctl

Spark Operator aims to make specifying and running Spark applications as easy and idiomatic as running other workloads on Kubernetes. It uses a CustomResourceDefinition (CRD) of SparkApplication objects for specifying, running, and surfacing status of Spark applications. For a complete reference of the API definition of the SparkApplication CRD, please refer to API Definition. For details on its design, please refer to the design doc. It requires Spark 2.3 and above that supports Kubernetes as a native scheduler backend. Below are some example things that the Spark Operator is able to automate (some are to be implemented):

• Submitting applications on behalf of users so they don't need to deal with the submission process and the spark-submit command.
• Mounting user-specified ConfigMaps into the driver and executor Pods.
• Mounting ConfigMaps carrying Spark or Hadoop configuration files that are to be put into a directory referred to by the environment variable SPARK_CONF_DIR or HADOOP_CONF_DIR into the driver and executor Pods. Example use cases include shipping a log4j.properties file for configuring logging and a core-site.xml file for configuring Hadoop and/or HDFS access.
• Creating a NodePort service for the Spark UI running on the driver so the UI can be accessed from outside the Kubernetes cluster, without needing to use API server proxy or port forwarding.

To make such automation possible, Spark Operator uses the SparkApplication CRD and a corresponding CRD controller as well as an initializer. The CRD controller setups the environment for an application and submits the application to run on behalf of the user, whereas the initializer handles customization of the Spark Pods.

This approach is completely different than the one that has the submission client creates a CRD object. Having externally created and managed CRD objects offer the following benefits:

• Things like creating namespaces and setting up RBAC roles and resource quotas represent a separate concern and are better done before applications get submitted.
• With the external CRD controller submitting applications on behalf of users, they don't need to deal with the submission process and the spark-submit command. Instead, the focus is shifted from thinking about commands to thinking about declarative YAML files describing Spark applications that can be easily version controlled.
• Externally created CRD objects make it easier to integrate Spark application submission and monitoring with users' existing pipelines and tooling on Kubernetes.
• Internally created CRD objects are good for capturing and communicating application/executor status to the users, but not for driver/executor pod configuration/customization as very likely it needs external input. Such external input most likely need additional command-line options to get passed in.

Additionally, keeping the CRD implementation outside the Spark repository gives us a lot of flexibility in terms of functionality to add to the CRD controller. We also have full control over code review and release process.

Spark Operator currently supports the following list of features:

• Supports Spark 2.3 and up.
• Supports automatic application submission for newly added SparkApplication objects.
• Supports automatic application re-submission for updated SparkAppliation objects with updated specification.
• Supports automatic application restart with a configurable restart policy.
• Supports automatic retries of failed submissions with optional linear back-off.
• Supports mounting user-specified ConfigMaps and volumes (not supported by Spark itself).
• Supports mounting local Hadoop configuration as a Kubernetes ConfigMap automatically via sparkctl.
• Supports automatically staging local application dependencies to Google Cloud Storage (GCS) via sparkctl.

The following list of features is planned:

• Supports automatically staging local application dependencies to HTTP servers and S3.
• Supports exporting Kubernetes events to Stackdriver.
• Supports automatic scale up and down when the number of executor instances changes.
• Supports automatically copying application logs to a central place, e.g., a GCS bucket, for bookkeeping, post-run checking, and analysis.
• Supports automatically creating namespaces and setting up RBAC roles and quotas, and running users' applications in separate namespaces for better resource isolation and quota management.