Big Data Foundations with Hadoop and Spark

About this course

This specialization features Coursera Coach! A smarter way to learn with interactive, real-time conversations that help you test your knowledge, challenge assumptions, and deepen your understanding as you progress through the specialization. Big data is transforming industries, and this specialization equips you with the skills to succeed. You’ll gain a foundation in Hadoop and Spark, learning how to store, process, and analyze massive datasets. Through theory and hands-on projects, you’ll develop practical expertise that applies directly to real-world scenarios. You’ll begin with Hadoop, setting up the Hortonworks Sandbox and working with HDFS, MapReduce, Pig, Hive, and Spark. Then, you’ll move to Apache Spark with Scala, mastering RDDs, SparkSQL, DataFrames, and cluster optimization. Next, you’ll explore Spark Streaming to process live data with use cases like Twitter analysis and log tracking. The specialization concludes with Apache Kafka, where you’ll implement producers, consumers, and advanced operations such as KRaft mode and Kafka Java programming. This intermediate specialization is designed for learners with basic programming in Java, Python, or Scala. It is ideal for data engineers, developers, and aspiring data scientists. By the end of the specialization, you will be able to design big data pipelines, process batch and real-time data, and integrate Kafka for scalable applications.

Course objectives

• provide a foundation in big data technologies
• develop practical skills through hands-on projects
• prepare learners for roles in data engineering and analysis