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Comment by rsp1984 | Hacker News Reader

rsp1984

So much this. Another perfect example: https://databricks.com

They just raised a $140m round of financing so apparently they have some good stuff going on. If you look at the website though:

The Unified Analytics Platform. Accelerate innovation by unifying data science, engineering, and business.

Sorry, what? Click on "learn more about the platform":

DATABRICKS IS A TRULY UNIFIED APPROACH TO DATA ANALYTICS AT SCALE. Founded by the team who created Apache Spark, Databricks provides a Unified Analytics Platform that accelerates innovation by unifying data science, engineering, and business.

I still have no clue what exactly TF the product is but I sure got my weekly dose of BS buzzwords.

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This is hilarious! I'm a paying customer of databricks, a useful service that can, and should, be described in a single medium length sentence.

How will you describe it?

Databricks provides a Unified Analytics Platform that accelerates innovation by unifying data science, engineering, and business.

... username checks out.

You missed an opportunity here

DATABRICKS IS A TRULY UNIFIED APPROACH TO DATA ANALYTICS AT SCALE

That sounds like a calendar + recipe aggregator idea.

It is the corporate support for Spark, a big data technology. Kinda like RedHat or Confluent.

I kind of disagree with you. Working in data science myself, I get that scientists, engineers and business people are not on the same page. Scientists like python hacks, engineers like big data architecture, business guys want reports. So to me databricks says it's an infrastructure that combines all of that.

Then there's a Learn More button right there, which explains all that in more details.

It's certainly complex and has a large ambition, but it's not like they're advertising that they're making the world a better place while selling todo lists.

I disagree, Databricks has an easy-to-understand pricing page: https://databricks.com/product/pricing

(It's a Hadoop distribution).

Not a Hadoop distribution as Databricks uses S3 and DBIO for storage not HDFS. It doesn't even use Yarn so it can't really be called Hadoop at all.

Basically the product is Spark Notebooks (think Juypter) on AWS that allow you to quickly create clusters and even do fancy stuff with spark streaming.

A key thing that people miss also is the the creator of Spark is the CTO of Databricks and Databricks to some extent controls the direction of Spark. This probably impacts its valuation.

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