Apache Spark is a fast and general engine for large-scale data processing. It was created by UC Berkeley and is now the dominant framework in big data. Spark can run programs over 100x faster than Hadoop in memory, or more than 10x faster on disk. It supports Scala, Java, Python, and R. Databricks provides a Spark platform on Azure that is optimized for performance and integrates tightly with other Azure services. Key benefits of Databricks on Azure include security, ease of use, data access, high performance, and the ability to solve complex analytics problems.