This document provides an overview of Spark and its integration with Cassandra for real-time data processing. It begins with introductions of the speaker and Datastax. It then discusses what Spark and Cassandra are, including their architectures and key characteristics like Spark being fast, easy to use, and supporting multiple languages. The document demonstrates basic Spark code and how RDDs work. It covers the Spark and Cassandra connectors and how they provide locality-aware joins. It also discusses use cases and deployment options. Finally, it considers future improvements like leveraging Solr for local filtering to improve data locality during joins.