Spark is an open-source cluster computing framework that can run analytics applications much faster than Hadoop by keeping data in memory rather than on disk. While Spark can access Hadoop's HDFS storage system and is often used as a replacement for Hadoop's MapReduce, Hadoop remains useful for batch processing and Spark is not expected to fully replace it. Spark provides speed, ease of use, and integration of SQL, streaming, and machine learning through its APIs in multiple languages.