title: Spark on Windows - What exactly is winutils and why do we need it?
body: <p>I'm curious! To my knowledge, HDFS needs datanode processes to run, and this is why it's only working on servers. Spark can run locally though, but needs winutils.exe which is a component of Hadoop. But what exactly does it do? How is it, that I cannot run Hadoop on Windows, but I can run Spark, which is built on Hadoop?</p>