Similar to Hadoop, YARN is one of the key features in Spark, providing a central and resource management platform to deliver scalable operations across the cluster. YARN is a distributed container manager, like Mesos for example, whereas Spark is a data processing tool. Spark can run on YARN, the same way Hadoop Map Reduce can run on YARN. Running Spark on YARN necessitates a binary distribution of Spark as built on YARN support.
