Last updated on September 21st, 2022 at 07:31 am

The Past, Present And Future Of Hadoop

Technologies that have become successful over a period of time go through innumerable cycles of discovery, invention, adoption, socialization, and constant improvement. Hadoop is no different from other technologies and it has followed the same path. 

Hadoop is an open-source software framework, which is mainly utilized for running applications and storing data on clusters of commodity hardware. With this framework, you will get huge storage for almost all kinds of data. Also, it provides massive processing power and the capacity of handling limitless simultaneous tasks or jobs. 

History of Hadoop

If you are interested and want to learn data science, then you have to know about the basics of Hadoop. We all know that when searched with a keyword, search engines provide us with relevant information. With the immense growth of the web, millions of pages were added every day. There was no other option than automating the process for displaying search results. 

This is where web crawlers were created. Many search-engine startups also emanated. One such project was called Nutch, which was an open-source web search engine. The idea of the project was to return search results quickly by distributing calculations and data across different systems so that multiple tasks could be completed simultaneously. 

At this same time, Google was also working on a similar kind of concept of processing and storing data in a distributed and automated manner so that proper search results can be returned faster. 

Nutch was the brainchild of Mike Cafarella and Doug Cutting. And, Cutting later joined Yahoo with his Nutch project. However, the Nutch project got divided. The distributed processing and computing part became Hadoop and the web crawler part remained Nutch. Yahoo then released Hadoop as an open-source project in 2008. 

Hadoop’s ecosystem of technologies and framework is maintained and managed by a non-profit Apache Software Foundation (ASF). This is a global community comprising software contributors and developers.

Hadoop is More of a Framework Than a Solution

It is needless to say that Hadoop’s technology brought a revolution in the world of data storage. Previously, it was expensive as well as difficult to store huge volumes of structured data. But, Hadoop took good care of this burden. Organizations and businesses found a cost-effective way of storing data with Hadoop. 

Hadoop clusters have been set up by many businesses so that they get better business insights or new information from the data. However, there is a slight hitch in this sector. Many businesses have tried to execute an analytics-based or business intelligence idea and they have been disappointed. 

For interactive queries, Hadoop proved to be very slow and this is a disappointment for many businesses. It is now understood that Hadoop is a framework and not a big data solution. For many businesses, Hadoop is too complicated. Basically, to handle Hadoop, a dedicated team is needed with programming knowledge and a level of configuration. 

Cloud-driven Evolution

The world of data warehousing is evolving fast and this means that Hadoop is evolving too. When Hadoop was created, then the public cloud did not exist. In fact, the IT landscape in which Hadoop had gained immense popularity has changed drastically over the years. Now, it is difficult to compare the previous landscape with the current IT landscape. 

Obviously, the way in which Hadoop was used has also changed. If you check instances like Azure’s HDInsight, AWS Elastic Map Reduce, and Google Cloud Platform’s DataProc, you will understand that the majority of public cloud infrastructure providers now integrate and actively maintain a managed Hadoop platform.  

Nowadays, the cloud-based Hadoop platform is commonly used for machine learning, batch processing, and ETL jobs. When a business moves to the cloud, it means that you can use Hadoop immediately and on demand. This happens because the total setup is complicated but it is already taken care of. 

There is no doubt that Hadoop has gained with its move to the cloud. But at the same time, Hadoop is not the only option now for secure, cheap, and robust data storage. Competition has increased drastically in the data-storage industry. There is no second thought that Hadoop is not the epicentre of the data universe. 

Future of Hadoop

It is pretty difficult to say that Hadoop is losing its place in the data market. This is because the framework comes with certain benefits, which are difficult to ignore. Hadoop is an excellent on-premise solution and the demand for such solutions is really high. Moreover, this demand will not go down soon in the coming years. 

Conclusion

Honing your skills in Hadoop or data science will help in making a great career. For a successful data scientist career, it is recommended to take up a course from a well-reputed institute like Imarticus Learning. With such a certification, more job opportunities will open up in the data science industry.