As distributed data parallel systems, like Spark, are used for more mission-critical tasks, it is important to have effective tools for testing and validation. This talk explores the general considerations and challenges of testing systems like Spark through spark-testing-base and other related libraries.
With over 40% of folks automatically deploying the results of their Spark jobs to production, testing is especially important. Many of the tools for working with big data systems (like notebooks) are great for exploratory work, and can give a false sense of security (as well as additional excuses not to test). This talk explores why testing these systems are hard, special considerations for simulating "bad" partioning, figuring out when your stream tests are stopped, and solutions to these challenges.
Speakers: Holden Karau