Typesafe Inc., the company co-founded by Martin Odersky, creator of the Scala programming language, has announced full commercial support for the Apache Spark Big data processing engine.

The move was announced at the Spark Summit Europe event in Amsterdam, Netherlands, last week, and underlines how Apache Spark has effectively become the default in-memory approach to large-scale data processing workloads among enterprises. The majority of SiliconANGLE readers will already know all about Spark’s popularity of course, but less will be aware of a recent Databricks Inc. survey that shows some 71 percent of Spark users also use the Scala language.

Having developed Scala, Typesafe’s support for Spark developers creating Big Data projects in Scala will almost certainly be unrivaled. The company boasted in its press release that it offers “deep experience in using Spark and Scale with a range of complementary technologies”, including Hadoop, Apache Mesos, Apache Kafka and Apache Cassandra.

Typesafe says its main motivation is to address what it calls the “developer skills gap”. The company says developers often find it difficult to configure and scale Spark across clusters of machines

“Being successful in any Spark project, whether it’s architecture, code reviews, best practices, or production support, calls for the best expertise in the world,” said Jamie Allen, Senior Director of Global Services at Typesafe. “Typesafe can help you build a truly Reactive big data solution so you have confidence you are designing, building and deploying things the right way and taking advantage of the full capabilities of Spark and related technologies.”

Typesafe has been cranking up its involvement with Spark in recent months. Last July it teamed up with Mesosphere Inc. to launch an Apache Spark distribution that’s optimized for deployment on the Mesosphere Datacenter Operating System (DCOS). Then in September, the company contributed “backpressure support” to Spark 1.5 that enhances operational stability for long-lived production streaming workloads by throttling data rates.

As well as offering commercial support for Spark that covers the full spectrum of pilot to production development, Typesafe also announced an introductory Spark workshop for developers. The workshop covers Spark Scala APIs and Spark internals, and how these affect performance, test and deployment scenarios.

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