What do you understand by Pyspark Streaming? How do you stream data using TCP/IP Protocol?

PySpark Streaming is scalable, fault-tolerant, high throughput based processing streaming system that supports streaming as well as batch loads for supporting real-time data from data sources like TCP Socket, S3, Kafka, Twitter, file system folders etc. The processed data can be sent to live dashboards, Kafka, databases, HDFS etc.

To perform Streaming from the TCP socket, we can use the readStream.format("socket") method of Spark session object for reading data from TCP socket and providing the streaming source host and port as options as shown in the code below:

from pyspark import SparkContext
from pyspark.streaming import StreamingContext
from pyspark.sql import SQLContext
from pyspark.sql.functions import desc
sc = SparkContext()
ssc = StreamingContext(sc, 10)
sqlContext = SQLContext(sc)
socket_stream = ssc.socketTextStream("127.0.0.1", 5555)
lines = socket_stream.window(20)
df.printSchema()?

Spark loads the data from the socket and represents it in the value column of the DataFrame object. The df.printSchema() prints

root
|-- value: string (nullable = true)?

Post data processing, the DataFrame can be streamed to the console or any other destinations based on the requirements like Kafka, dashboards, database etc.