Why Hadoop

Hadoop and Big data:

Hadoop is almost 10 years old and is still on a rise! First the social media companies and now more and more enterprise-driven companies are looking forward to Hadoop to manage their ever-increasing Big Data. We know what Big data is (you can refer to our post on Big Data).
Big data is nothing but an assortment of such a huge and complex data that it becomes very tedious to capture, store, process, retrieve and analyze it with the help of on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing techniques. Apache Hadoop is considered to be one of the best solutions to leverage Big Data!

Key features that answer – Why Hadoop?

1. Flexible:

As it is a known fact, that only 20% of data in the organizations is structured, and the rest is all unstructured, it is very crucial to manage unstructured data which goes unattended. Hadoop is the core to manage different types of Big Data, whether structured or unstructured, encoded or formatted, or any other type of data and makes it useful for decision making process. Moreover, Hadoop is simple, relevant and schema-less! Though Hadoop generally supports Java Programming, but to your pleasant surprise, any programming language can be used in Hadoop with the help of the MapReduce technique. Though Hadoop works best on Windows and Linux, it can also work on other operating systems like BSD and OS X.

2.  Scalable

Hadoop is a scalable platform, in the sense that new nodes can be easily added in the system as and when required without altering the data formats, how data is loaded, how programs are written, or even without modifying the existing applications. Hadoop is a totally open source platform and runs on industry-standard hardware. Moreover, Hadoop is also fault tolerant – this means, even if a node gets lost or goes out of service, the system automatically reallocates work to another location of the data and continues processing as if nothing had happened!

3. Building more efficient data economy:

Hadoop has revolutionized the processing and analysis of Big data world across. Till now, organizations were worrying about how to manage the non-stop data overflowing in their systems. Hadoop is more like a “Dam”, which is harnessing the flow of unlimited amount of data and generating a lot of power in the form of relevant information. Hadoop has changed the economics of storing and evaluating data entirely!

4. Robust Ecosystem:

As seen in our last blog post on Hadoop, it is blessed with a very robust and rich ecosystem that is well suited to meet the analytical needs of the developers, web startups and other organizations. Hadoop Ecosystem consists of various related projects such as MapReduce, Hive, HBase, Zookeeper, HCatalog, Apache Pig, which make Hadoop very competent to deliver a broad spectrum of services.

5. Hadoop is getting more “Real-Time”!

Did you ever wonder how to stream information into a cluster and analyze it in real time? Hadoop has the answer for it! Yes, Hadoop’s competencies are getting more and more real-time. Hadoop also provides a standard approach to a wide set of APIs for big data analytics comprising of MapReduce, query languages and database access, and so on.

6. Cost Effective:

Loaded with such great features, the icing on the cake is that Hadoop generates cost benefits by bringing massively parallel computing to commodity servers, resulting in a substantial reduction in the cost per terabyte of storage, which in turn makes it reasonable to model all your data. The basic idea behind Hadoop is to perform cost effective data analysis present across world wide web!

7.  Upcoming Technologies using Hadoop:

With reinforcing its capabilities, Hadoop is leading to phenomenal technical advancements.
For instance, HBase will soon become a vital Platform for Blob Stores (Binary Large Objects) and for Lightweight OLTP (Online Transaction Processing). Hadoop has also begun serving as a strong foundation for new-school graph and NoSQL databases, and better versions of relational databases.

8.  Hadoop is getting Cloudy!

Hadoop is getting cloudier! In fact, Cloud computing and Hadoop are synchronizing in several organizations to manage Big Data. In no time, Hadoop will become one of the most required Apps for Cloud Computing. This is evident from the number of Hadoop clusters offered by cloud vendors in various businesses. Thus, Hadoop will reside in the cloud soon.

Now you know why Hadoop is gaining so much popularity.
Some of the Top companies using Hadoop:

The importance of Hadoop is evident from the fact that there are many global MNCs that are using Hadoop and consider it as an integral part of their functioning. It is a misconception that social media companies alone use Hadoop. In fact, many other industries now use Hadoop to manage BIG DATA!

- It was yahoo!Inc. that developed the world’s biggest application of Hadoop on February 19, 2008. In-fact, if you have heard of ‘The Yahoo! Search Web map’, it is a Hadoop application that runs on over 10,000 core Linux cluster and generates data that is now extensively used in each query of Yahoo! Web search.

- Facebook, which is a $5.1 billion company, has over 1 billion active users! It is Hadoop that brings respite to Facebook in storing and managing data of such magnitude. Hadoop helps Facebook in keeping track of all the profiles stored in it, along with the related data such as posts, comments, images, videos, and so on.

- And how does Linked in manage over 1 billion personalized recommendations every week? All thanks to Hadoop and its Map Reduce and HDFS features!

- Hadoop is at its best when it comes to analyzing Big Data. This is why companies like Rackspace uses Hadoop.

- Hadoop plays an equally competent role in analyzing huge volumes of data generated by scientifically driven companies like Spadac.com.

- Hadoop is a great framework for advertising companies as well. It keeps a good track of the millions of clicks on the ads and how the users are responding to the ads posted by the big Ad agencies!