In a recent podcast from O’Reilly Radar, Ben Lorica interviews AMPLab alumnus and Databricks Co-founder Patrick Wendell on the roots of Apache Spark at the AMPLab and where Spark is going in the future.   Patrick discusses (among other things) the goal AMPLab students had from the very beginning of the Spark project to build a system that was both useful and usable and the work they put in on seeding and growing a vibrant community around Spark.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2015/06/apache-spark-powering-applications-on-premise-and-in-the-cloud.html