Interesting!

On a non-technical note, I got a chuckle out of this honest description of the motivations for the project:

His students noticed how “important and famous” Zaharia suddenly became for creating Spark; Zaharia has since gone on to co-found Databricks and accept an assistant professorship at rival Stanford University.

“So the next generation,” Jordan said, “they said, ‘we’re not just going to just give a project to the systems people. We’re going to do it ourselves.’