<p>If a distributed computing framework spins up nodes for running   Java/ Scala operations then it has to include the JVM in every container. E.g. every Map and Reduce step spawns its own JVM.</p>

<p>How does the efficiency of this instantiation compare to spinning up containers for languages like Python? Is it a question of milliseconds, few seconds, 30 seconds? Does this cost add up in frameworks like Kubernetes where you need to spin up many containers?</p>

<p>I've heard that, much like Alpine Linux is just a few MB, there are stripped down JVMs, but still, there must be a cost. Yet, Scala is the first class citizen in Spark and MR is written in Java.</p>

Kermit
<p>Linux container technology uses layered filesystems so bigger container images don't generally have a ton of runtime overhead, though you do have to download the image the first time it is used on a node which can potentially add up on truly massive clusters. In general this is not usually a thing to worry about, aside from the well known issues of most JVMs being a bit slow to start up. Spark, however, does not spin up a new container for every operation as you describe. It creates a set of executor containers (pods) which are used for the whole Spark execution run.</p>
