Cloudera Inc. last week said it’s going to spearhead efforts to replace MapReduce with Apache Spark as the data processing engine of choice in Hadoop, and now it’s announced an expansion of its Spark training programs to help make that happen.

Cloudera is now offering a choice of comprehensive, hands-on Spark education courses aimed at providing developers, analysts and data scientists with the skills necessary to integrate and exploit Spark in Hadoop environments.

The options include the “Developer Training for Spark and Hadoop I | Developer Training for Spark and Hadoop II: Advanced Techniques” course, which aims to give students “a thorough understanding of Cloudera Enterprise’s entire data engineering pipeline from data ingestion to data processing, with Apache Spark serving as the core processing framework”, and primes them for Cloudera’s performance-based CCP: Data Engineer certification.

The “Developer Training for Spark” course is one that’s focused soley on Spark, and is described by Cloudera as its “core” training program. The course is open to both individuals and companies who’re familiar with Cloudera Hadoop and wish to migrate or integrate Spark.

Next up is the “Data Science at Scale with Spark and Hadoop” course, which is specially designed for data scientists. Cloudera says the emphasis is placed on the application rather than processing in this course, with advanced topics including MLlib (machine learning libraries included in Spark). Upon completion of the course, students should be able to attempt the Cloudera CCP: Data Scientist certification.

Finally there’s the Cloudera Academic Program (CAP) designed for university-level students with the aim of preparing them for a career in Big Data. The course now includes Spark components for universities affiliated with the program, and aims to prepare students for Cloudera’s CCA: Spark and Hadoop Developer Certification.

The revamped courses come on the back of the One Platform initiative Cloudera announced last week. That initiative aims to bring the level of integration between Spark and the other projects in the Hadoop universe more up to par with the interoperability currently offered by MapReduce. Cloudera’s says the initiative is necessary because Spark has all the core elements necessary to become the next open standard for data processing in Hadoop. Most analysts agree that Spark will inevitably replace MapReduce for most workloads, and as such, Cloudera believes it’s critical for companies to obtain the skills necessary to take ful advantage.

“Our goal is to teach users how to use Spark alongside other resources they have available in their Hadoop clusters,” said Mark Morrissey, Senior Director of Education Services at Cloudera. “Whether people are new to Hadoop or have some exposure to it, our curriculum provides an entry point which sets them up for success and helps them to become more resilient as their environment of tools change.”

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