Spark, Hadoop, and Snowflake for Data Engineering (Coursera)

Offered by Duke University,
Spark, Hadoop, and Snowflake for Data Engineering (Coursera)

This is primarily aimed at first- and second-year undergraduates interested in engineering or science, along with high school students and professionals with an interest in programming. Gain the skills for building efficient and scalable data pipelines.

Class Deals by MOOC List - Click here and see Coursera's Active Discounts, Deals, and Promo Codes.

Explore essential data engineering platforms (Hadoop, Spark, and Snowflake) as well as learn how to optimize and manage them. Delve into Databricks, a powerful platform for executing data analytics and machine learning tasks, while honing your Python data science skills with PySpark. Finally, discover the key concepts of MLflow, an open-source platform for managing the end-to-end machine learning lifecycle, and learn how to integrate it with Databricks.
This course is designed for learners who want to pursue or advance their career in data science or data engineering, or for software developers or engineers who want to grow their data management skill set. In addition to the technologies you will learn, you will also gain methodologies to help you hone your project management and workflow skills for data engineering, including applying Kaizen, DevOps, and Data Ops methodologies and best practices.
With quizzes to test your knowledge throughout, this comprehensive course will help guide your learning journey to become a proficient data engineer, ready to tackle the challenges of today's data-driven world.

What you'll learn

  • Create scalable data pipelines (Hadoop, Spark, Snowflake, Databricks) for efficient data handling.
  • Optimize data engineering with clustering and scaling to boost performance and resource use.
  • Build ML solutions (PySpark, MLFlow) on Databricks for seamless model development and deployment.
  • Implement DataOps and DevOps practices for continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) of data-driven applications, including automating processes.

Syllabus

Overview and Introduction to PySpark
This week, you will learn how to work with different data engineering platforms, such as Hadoop and Spark, and apply their concepts to real-world scenarios. First, you will explore the fundamentals of Hadoop to store and process big data. Next, you will delve into Spark concepts, distributed computing, deferred execution, and Spark SQL. By the end of the week, you will gain hands-on experience with PySpark DataFrames, DataFrame methods, and deferred execution strategies.

Snowflake
This week, you will explore the Snowflake platform, gaining insights into its architecture and key concepts. Through hands-on practice in the Snowflake Web UI, you'll learn to create tables, manage warehouses, and use the Snowflake Python Connector to interact with tables. By the end of this week, you'll solidify your understanding of Snowflake's architecture and practical applications, emerging with the ability to effectively navigate and leverage the platform for data management and analysis.

Azure Databricks and MLFLow
This week, you will practice the essential skills for seamlessly managing machine learning workflows using Databricks and MLFlow. First, you will create a Databricks workspace and configure a cluster, setting the stage for efficient data analysis. Next, you will load a sample dataset into the Databricks workspace using the power of PySpark, enabling data manipulation and exploration. Finally, you will install MLFlow either locally or within the Databricks environment, gaining the ability to orchestrate the entire machine learning lifecycle. By the end of this week, you will be able to craft, track, and manage machine learning experiments within Databricks, ensuring precision, reproducibility, and optimal decision-making throughout your data-driven journey.

DataOps and Operations Methodologies
This week, you will explore the concepts of Kaizen, DevOps, and DataOps and how these methodologies synergistically contribute to efficient and seamless data engineering workflows. Through practical examples, you will learn how Kaizen's continuous improvement philosophy, DevOps' collaborative practices, and DataOps' focus on data quality and integration converge to enhance the development, deployment, and management of data engineering platforms. By the end of this week, you will have the knowledge and perspective needed to optimize data engineering processes and deliver scalable, reliable, and high-quality solutions.

Go to Class
MOOC List is learner-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Related Courses

Security and Privacy for Big Data - Part 1 (Coursera) Coursera
EIT Digital

Security and Privacy for Big Data - Part 1 (Coursera)

This course sensitizes regarding security in Big Data environments. You will discover cryptographic principles, mechanisms to manage access controls in your Big Data system. By the end of the course, you will be ready to plan your next Big Data project successfully, ensuring that all security related issues are under control. You will look at decent-sized big data projects with security-skilled eyes, being able to recognize dangers. This will allow you to improve your systems to a grown and sustainable level.

Oct 5th 2026
1 Week
Spatial Data Science and Applications (Coursera) Coursera
Yonsei University

Spatial Data Science and Applications (Coursera)

Spatial (map) is considered as a core infrastructure of modern IT world, which is substantiated by business transactions of major IT companies such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Intel, and Uber, and even motor companies such as Audi, BMW, and Mercedes. Consequently, they are bound to hire more and more spatial data scientists. Based on such business trend, this course is designed to present a firm understanding of spatial data science to the learners, who would have a basic knowledge of data science and data analysis, and eventually to make their expertise differentiated from other nominal data scientists and data analysts.

Oct 5th 2026
5-12 Weeks
New Technologies for Business Leaders (Coursera) Coursera
Rutgers University

New Technologies for Business Leaders (Coursera)

This introductory course is developed for high-level business people (and those on their way) who want a broad understanding of new Information Technologies and understand their potential for business functions (e.g. marketing, supply change management, finance). This is not a course for people looking for guidance on how to become a deep technical expert or implement these technologies.

Sep 28th 2026
5-12 Weeks
Big Data Analysis with Scala and Spark (Coursera) Coursera
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Big Data Analysis with Scala and Spark (Coursera)

Manipulating big data distributed over a cluster using functional concepts is rampant in industry, and is arguably one of the first widespread industrial uses of functional ideas. This is evidenced by the popularity of MapReduce and Hadoop, and most recently Apache Spark, a fast, in-memory distributed collections framework written in Scala. In this course, we'll see how the data parallel paradigm can be extended to the distributed case, using Spark throughout.

Oct 12th 2026
4 Weeks
Deploying Machine Learning Models (Coursera) Coursera
University of California, San Diego

Deploying Machine Learning Models (Coursera)

In this course we will learn about Recommender Systems (which we will study for the Capstone project), and also look at deployment issues for data products. By the end of this course, you should be able to implement a working recommender system (e.g. to predict ratings, or generate lists of related products), and you should understand the tools and techniques required to deploy such a working system on real-world, large-scale datasets.

Sep 28th 2026
4 Weeks
Cadeia de Suprimentos na Nuvem (Coursera) Coursera
FIA Business School

Cadeia de Suprimentos na Nuvem (Coursera)

Nossas boas-vindas ao Curso Cadeia de Suprimentos na Nuvem. Neste curso, você aprenderá como o supply chain pode ampliar o valor da empresa explorando as diversas ferramentas disponíveis em cloud para potencializar a visibilidade e a responsividade da cadeia, melhorando o nível de serviço prestado aos clientes.

Oct 12th 2026
5-12 Weeks
Infonomics II: Business Information Management and Measurement (Coursera) Coursera
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Infonomics II: Business Information Management and Measurement (Coursera)

Even decades into the Information Age, accounting practices yet fail to recognize the financial value of information. Moreover, traditional asset management practices fail to recognize information as an asset to be managed with earnest discipline. This has led to a business culture of complacence, and the inability for most organizations to fully leverage available information assets. This second course in the two-part Infonomics series explores how and why to adapt well-honed asset management principles and practices to information, and how to apply accepted and new valuation models to gauge information’s potential and realized economic benefits.

Oct 12th 2026
4 Weeks
Cloud Computing Applications, Part 2: Big Data and Applications in the Cloud (Coursera) Coursera
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Cloud Computing Applications, Part 2: Big Data and Applications in the Cloud (Coursera)

Welcome to the Cloud Computing Applications course, the second part of a two-course series designed to give you a comprehensive view on the world of Cloud Computing and Big Data! In this second course we continue Cloud Computing Applications by exploring how the Cloud opens up data analytics of huge volumes of data that are static or streamed at high velocity and represent an enormous variety of information. Cloud applications and data analytics represent a disruptive change in the ways that society is informed by, and uses information.

Sep 28th 2026
4 Weeks
Graph Analytics for Big Data (Coursera) Coursera
University of California, San Diego

Graph Analytics for Big Data (Coursera)

Want to understand your data network structure and how it changes under different conditions? Curious to know how to identify closely interacting clusters within a graph? Have you heard of the fast-growing area of graph analytics and want to learn more? This course gives you a broad overview of the field of graph analytics so you can learn new ways to model, store, retrieve and analyze graph-structured data.

Sep 28th 2026
5-12 Weeks
Foundations for Big Data Analysis with SQL (Coursera) Coursera
Cloudera

Foundations for Big Data Analysis with SQL (Coursera)

In this course, you'll get a big-picture view of using SQL for big data, starting with an overview of data, database systems, and the common querying language (SQL). Then you'll learn the characteristics of big data and SQL tools for working on big data platforms. You'll also install an exercise environment (virtual machine) to be used through the specialization courses, and you'll have an opportunity to do some initial exploration of databases and tables in that environment.

Sep 28th 2026
5-12 Weeks
Machine Learning With Big Data (Coursera) Coursera
University of California, San Diego

Machine Learning With Big Data (Coursera)

Want to make sense of the volumes of data you have collected? Need to incorporate data-driven decisions into your process? This course provides an overview of machine learning techniques to explore, analyze, and leverage data. You will be introduced to tools and algorithms you can use to create machine learning models that learn from data, and to scale those models up to big data problems.

Sep 28th 2026
5-12 Weeks