We’re proud to announce the release of Spark 0.7.0, a new major version of Spark that adds several key features, including a Python API for Spark, an alpha of Spark Streaming, and numerous improvements across the board. This release is the result of the largest group of contributors yet behind a Spark release — 31 contributors in total, of which 20 were external to Berkeley. Head over to the release notes to read more about the new features, or download the code.

I’d also like to thank the people who contributed to the release: Mikhail Bautin, Denny Britz, Paul Cavallaro, Tathagata Das, Thomas Dudziak, Harvey Feng, Stephen Haberman, Tyson Hamilton, Mark Hamstra, Michael Heuer, Shane Huang, Andy Konwinski, Ryan LeCompte, Haoyuan Li, Richard McKinley, Sean McNamara, Lee Moon Soo, Fernand Pajot, Nick Pentreath, Andrew Psaltis, Imran Rashid, Charles Reiss, Josh Rosen, Peter Sankauskas, Prashant Sharma, Shivaram Venkataraman, Patrick Wendell, Reynold Xin, Haitao Yao, Matei Zaharia, and Eric Zhang. The growing number of external contributors is a trend we are very proud of at the AMPLab, as our goal is to continue building a leading open source data analytics stack over the next five years. We hope to see even more contributors to Spark in the future!