The Spark context, as you will see in many of the examples in this book, can be defined via a Spark configuration object and Spark URL. The Spark context connects to the Spark cluster manager, which then allocates resources across the worker nodes for the application. The cluster manager allocates executors across the cluster worker nodes. It copies the application JAR file to the workers and finally allocates tasks.

The following subsections describe the possible Apache Spark cluster manager options available at this time.