We’re only a couple of months away from the new year, which means it’s time to start looking ahead to the tech trends that will dominate the software industry in 2022. As the new year approaches, we want to help you get familiar with upcoming trends so you can be prepared and start taking your skills to the next level. Today, we’ll discuss Hadoop.
The Hadoop framework provides an open-source platform to process large amounts of data across clusters of computers. Because of its powerful features, it has become extremely popular in the big data field. Hadoop allows us to store any kind of data and handle multiple concurrent tasks. We’re going to dive deeper into the Hadoop platform and discuss the Hadoop ecosystem, how Hadoop works, its pros and cons, and much more.
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Hadoop is an open-source software framework developed by the Apache Software Foundation. It uses programming models to process large data sets. Hadoop is written in Java, and it’s built on Hadoop clusters. These clusters are collections of computers, or nodes, that work together to execute computations on data. Apache has other software projects that integrate with Hadoop, including ones to perform data storage, manage Hadoop jobs, analyze data, and much more. We can use Hadoop with cloud services such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Cloudera to manage and organize our big data efforts.
Apache Hadoop started in 2002 when Doug Cutting and Mike Cafarella were working on Apache Nutch. They learned that Nutch wasn’t fully capable of handling large amounts of data, so they began brainstorming for a solution. They learned about the architecture of the Google File System (GFS) and the MapReduce technique, which processes large data sets. They started implementing GFS and MapReduce techniques into their open-source Nutch project, but Nutch still didn’t fully meet their needs.
When Cutting joined Yahoo in 2006, he formed a new project called Hadoop. He separated the distributed computing parts from Apache Nutch and worked with Yahoo to design Hadoop so that it could handle thousands of nodes. In 2007, Yahoo tested Hadoop on a 1,000 node cluster and began using it internally. In early 2008, Hadoop was released as an open-source project at the Apache Software Foundation. Later that year, they successfully tested Hadoop on a 4,000 node cluster.
In 2009, Hadoop was capable of handling billions of searches and indexing millions of web pages. At this time, Cutting joined the Cloudera team to help spread Hadoop into the cloud industry. Finally, in 2011, version 1.0 of Hadoop was released. The latest version (3.3.1) was released in 2021.
The Hadoop ecosystem is a suite of services we can use to work with big data initiatives. The four main elements of the ecosystem include:
Hadoop MapReduce is a programming model used for distributed computing. With this model, we can process large amounts of data in parallel on large clusters of commodity hardware. With MapReduce, we can use Map and Reduce. With Map, we can convert a set of data into tuples (key/value pairs). Reduce takes the output of Map as input and combines the tuples into smaller sets of tuples. MapReduce makes it easy to scale data processing to run tens of thousands of machines in a cluster.
During MapReduce jobs, Hadoop sends the tasks to their respective servers in the cluster. When the tasks are completed, the clusters collect and reduce data into a result and send the result back to the Hadoop server.
As the name suggests, HDFS is a distributed file system. It handles large sets of data and runs on commodity hardware. HDFS helps us scale single Hadoop clusters to multiple nodes, and it helps us perform parallel processing. The built-in servers, NameNode and DataNode, help us check the status of our clusters. HDFS is designed to be highly fault-tolerant, portable, and cost-effective.
Hadoop YARN is a cluster resource management and job scheduling tool. YARN also works with the data we store in HDFS, allowing us to perform tasks such as:
It dynamically allocates resources and schedules application processing. YARN supports MapReduce, along with multiple other processing models. It efficiently utilizes resources and is backward compatible, meaning that it can run on previous Hadoop versions without any issues.
Hadoop Common, also known as Hadoop Core, provides Java libraries that we can use across all of our Hadoop modules.
In the previous section, we discussed a large amount of the services that integrate with Hadoop. We now know that the Hadoop ecosystem is large and extensible. It allows us to perform many tasks, such as collecting, storing, analyzing, processing, and managing big data. Hadoop provides us with a platform in which we can build other services and applications.
Applications can use API operations to connect to NameNode and place data in Hadoop clusters. NameNode
replicates this data in chunks across DataNodes. We can use MapReduce to run jobs, query data, and reduce tasks in HDFS. Map tasks run on each node against the files we supply, and reduce tasks, or reducers, aggregate and organize our output.
Data-driven decisions
We can integrate structured and unstructured data not used in a data warehouse or relational database. This allows us to make more precise decisions that are based on broad data.
Big data analytics and access
Hadoop is great for data scientists and ML engineers because it allows us to perform advanced analytics to find patterns and develop accurate and effective predictive models.
Data lakes
Hadoop governance solutions can help us with data integration, security, and quality for data lakes.
Financial services
Hadoop can help us build and run applications to assess risk, design investment models, and create trading algorithms.
Healthcare
Hadoop helps us track large-scale health indexes and keep track of patient records.
Sales prediction
Hadoop is used in retail companies to help predict sales and increase profits by studying historical data.
Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark are commonly compared to one another because they’re both open-source frameworks for big data processing. Spark is a newer project, which was initially developed in 2012. It focuses on the parallel processing of data across a cluster, and it works in memory. This means that it’s a lot faster than MapReduce.
Hadoop is the better platform if you’re working with batch processing large amounts of data. Spark is the better platform if you’re streaming data, creating graph computations, or doing machine learning. Spark supports real-time data processing and batch processing as well. There are a lot of different libraries that you can use with Spark, including ones for machine learning, SQL tasks, streaming data, and graphing.
Congrats on taking your first steps with Apache Hadoop! The Hadoop ecosystem is powerful and extensive, and there’s still so much more to learn about Hadoop. Some recommended concepts to cover next include:
To get started learning these concepts and more, check out Educative’s course Introduction to Big Data and Hadoop. In this hands-on course, you’ll learn the fundamentals of big data and work closely with functioning Hadoop clusters. By the end of the course, you’ll have the foundational knowledge to begin working in the big data field.
Happy learning!
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