Apache Spark is a distributed computing system. It consists of a master and one or more slaves, where the master distributes the work among the slaves, thus giving the ability to use our many computers to work on one task. One could guess that this is indeed a powerful tool where tasks need large computations to complete, but can be split into smaller chunks of steps that can be pushed to the slaves to work on. Once our cluster is up and running, we can write programs to run on it in Python, Java, and Scala.