Apache Spark is an open-source cluster computing framework designed for real-time data processing and analysis, offering components such as Spark Core, Spark SQL, Spark Streaming, MLlib, and GraphX. It provides fast processing, in-memory computations, and fault tolerance, which allow it to efficiently manage large datasets and run various machine learning algorithms. The architecture is built on resilient distributed datasets (RDDs) and uses a master-slave model for job execution across clusters.