This guest post comes courtesy of Tony Baer's OnStrategies blog. Baer is a principal analyst covering Big Data at Ovum.

If it seems like we've been down this path before, well, maybe we have. June has been a month of juxtapositions, back and forth to the west coast for Hadoop and Spark Summits. The mood from last week to this has been quite contrasting. Spark Summit has the kind of canned heat that Hadoop conferences had a couple years back. We won't stretch the Dickens metaphor.

Yeah, it's human nature to say, down with the old and in with the new.

But let's set something straight: Spark ain't going to replace Hadoop, as we're talking about apples and oranges. Spark can run on Hadoop, and it can run on other data platforms. What it might replace is MapReduce, if Spark can overcome its scaling hurdles. And it could fulfill IBM's vision as the next analytic operating system if it addresses mundane -- but very important concerns -- for supporting scaling, high concurrency, and bulletproof security. Spark originated at UC Berkeley's AMPLab back in 2009, with the founders forming Databricks. With roughly 700 contributors committers , Spark has ballooned to becoming the most active open source project in the Apache community, barely 2 years after becoming an Apache project.

Spark is best known as a sort of in-memory analytics replacement for iterative computation frameworks like MapReduce; both employ massively parallel compute and then shuffle interim results, with the difference being that Spark caches in memory while MapReduce writes to disk. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Spark offers a simpler programming model, better fault tolerance, and it's far more extensible than MapReduce. Spark is any form of iterative computation, and it was designed to support specific extensions; among the most popular are machine learning, microbatch stream processing, graph computing, and even SQL.

By contrast, Hadoop is a data platform. It is one of many that can run Spark, because Spark is platform-independent. So you could also run Spark on Cassandra, other NoSQL data store, or SQL databases, but Hadoop has been the most popular target right now.

And, not to forget Apache Mesos, another AMPLab discovery for cluster management to which Spark had originally been closely associated.

There's little question about the excitement level over Spark. By now the headlines have poured out over IBM investing $300 million, committing 3500 developers, establishing a Spark open source development center a few BART stops from AMPLab in San Francisco, and aiming directly and through partners to educate 1 million professionals on Spark in the next few years (or about 4 - 5x the current number registered for IBM's online Big Data university). IBM views Spark's strength as machine learning, and wants to make machine learning a declarative programming experience that will fellow in SQL's footsteps with its new SystemML language (which it plans to open source).

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That's not to overshadow Databricks' announcement that its Spark developer cloud, in preview over the past year, has now gone GA. The big challenge facing Databricks was making its cloud scalable and sufficiently elastic to meet the demand -- and not become a victim of its own success. And there is the growing number of vendors that are embedding Spark within their analytic tools, streaming products, and development tools. The release announcement of Spark 1.4 brings new manageability and capability for automatically renewing Kerberos tokens for long running processes like streaming. But there remain growing pains, like reducing the number of moving parts needed to make Spark a first class citizen with Hadoop YARN.

By contrast, last week was about Hadoop becoming more manageable and more amenable to enterprise infrastructure, like shared storage as our colleague Merv Adrian pointed out. Not to mention enduring adolescent factional turf wars.

It's easy to get excited by the idealism around the shiny new thing. While the sky seems the limit, the reality is that there's lots of blocking and tackling ahead. And the need for engaging, not only developers, but business stakeholders through applications, rather than development tools, and success stories with tangible results. It's a stage that the Hadoop community is just starting to embrace now.