SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Feb 17, 2016) - Databricks, the company behind Apache Spark, today announced the beta release of Databricks Community Edition, a free version of the cloud-based big data platform at Spark Summit East. This service will provide users with access to a micro-cluster as well as a cluster manager and notebook environment, making it ideal for developers, data scientists, data engineers and other IT professionals to learn Spark. Registered attendees at Spark Summit East will be given first access to the invite-only beta rollout of the free service. Accessibility to the broader community will be admitted over the coming months, with general availability planned for late Q2 2016.

According to the 2015 Spark Survey, Spark adoption is rapidly growing as IT professionals leverage the engine to make data processing easy and accessible. As founders of Apache Spark and the largest contributor to Spark development, Databricks aims to open doors for IT professionals through Community Edition by making it easy for them to get started with Spark.

In keeping with the company's mission to make big data simple, Databricks is committed to bringing Spark access and high-quality training to every user. Databricks Community Edition comes with a rich portfolio of Spark training resources, including the award-winning Massive Open Online Course, "Introduction to Big Data with Apache Spark," which has enrolled over 76,000 participants to date. Databricks will continue to develop Spark tutorials and training materials that will be directly accessible as part of Community Edition over time. Databricks Community Edition will enable users to seamlessly transition their prototypes to production applications on the full Databricks platform.

"As developers at heart, we find value in empowering professionals to tackle big data problems, and as a result, we are committed to the development of the Spark engine and the healthy growth of the community," said Ion Stoica, executive chairman at Databricks. "We're happy to contribute back to the community by releasing Community Edition of Databricks for free and we're excited to see how users experiment with the platform."

"Before the release of Community Edition you had to either build your own cluster or pay thousands of dollars per month to learn how to do data science and advanced analytics such as machine learning," said Ben Horowitz, co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz. "By combining Databricks' new offering with their highly popular Spark MOOCs, more people can now develop an expertise in data science -- which has become one of the most valuable skill sets in technology -- for free."

Join the Databricks Community Edition waitlist: http://dbricks.co/join-dce-beta

For more information on Spark Summit East: https://spark-summit.org/east-2016/

About Databricks:
Databricks' vision is to make big data simple for the enterprise. The company was founded by the team that created and continues to drive Apache Spark, a powerful open source data processing engine built for sophisticated analytics, ease of use, and speed. Databricks is the largest contributor to the open source Spark project providing 10x more code than any other company. The company has also trained over 20,000 users on Apache Spark, and has the largest number of customers deploying Spark to date. Databricks is venture-backed by Andreessen Horowitz and NEA. For more information, contact info@databricks.com.