title: Create a timer within a spark context
body: <p>We have a spark application that streams from Kafka, and consume customer activity. I am trying to determine if a customer has stopped being active on our system for 3 minutes, (i.e. not received another transaction for this customer for 3 minutes).</p>
  
  <p>I'm not sure if I am trying to implement this the right way, or if it doesn't make sense to have this logic in Spark, but I am trying to use the RecurringTimer class to do this. Has anybody implemented something similar, and if so what utility function was used in the spark libraries?</p>
  
  <p>Any example, pointers etc. would also be greatly appreciated</p>