Paige Roberts writes the “Big Data Page by Paige” blog and she has recently been surveying Big Data analytics frameworks.   Her Aug 18th post, called “The Spark That Set the Hadoop World on Fire” provides some nice context on the rise of Spark.   It concludes with the following quote, which summarizes part of Spark’s appeal quite nicely:

“The entire BDAS and DataBricks stack of applications that surround Spark like boy scouts around a campfire give it a can-do, ready for almost anything attitude.”