MapR Technologies Inc., is getting serious about addressing the well-known “skills gap” in tech; it just rolled out a new on-demand training and certification course for Apache Spark, the in-memory analytics engine that many people think is of the most important big data technologies.

MapR is better known for its association with Hadoop than Spark. It’s one of the “Big 3” Hadoop vendors after Cloudera Inc. and Hortonworks Inc. Indeed, the company actually rolled out a similar training course for Hadoop last year, and has since trained over 50,000 people, according to CMO Jack Norris, who appeared on theCUBE at Spark Summit East 2016 in New York City yesterday (see video at the end of this article).

The new online Spark curriculum via MapR Academy’s On-Demand Training is free for all students, and leads to a developer certification in Spark, though students have to pay to take the exam.

“There is tremendous momentum propelling Spark, largely because of the benefits it provides for batch, interactive and streaming applications,” said Suzanne Ferry, vice president of global training and enablement at MapR. “We continue to evolve the coursework offered in our free on-demand training program to meet the learning needs of developers, data analysts and administrators.”

The course is designed to prepare developers for the MapR Certified Spark Developer (MCSD) exam, a certification that validates a developer’s technical knowledge, skills and ability to use Spark in enterprise environments. Once developers have passed the test, they are qualified to load and inspect data on Spark, build applications, work with Dataframes and Pair RDD, monitor Spark application performance and perform advanced programming on Spark with MLLib.

The course offers the following modules: Apache Spark Essentials; Build and Monitor Spark Apache Applications; and Create Data Pipelines using Apache Spark. In addition, students get access to a free Spark certification study guide and a big discount on the Apache Spark certification exam at the end of the course. This exam, which is normally prices at $250, is being offered by MapR for just $100.

More information about MapR’s courses is available here.

Separately, MapR yesterday made a preview of Spark 1.6 available for developers to test on its Converged Data Platform. Announced at SparkSummit, the Spark 1.6 Developer Preview provides access to the latest features and advancements in Spark, atop MapR’s enterprise-grade Hadoop platform. The Spark 1.6 preview can be downloaded from MapR’s website here.

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