We're Entering the Golden Age of Hadoop

Although the first couple years of the commercial Hadoop era have been characterized by an attitude of “Hadoop is great, but …”, the tone is changing as Hadoop vendors make the platform more palatable with each iteration. No longer is a Hadoop job necessarily an epic undertaking rife with pitfalls; if you know how to leverage it, at least, Hadoop is becoming as reliable as any other data-management tool on the market.

This sort of evolution was to be expected, of course, because Hadoop is an open-source Apache Software Foundation product whose commercialization is still in its infancy. Early adopters within Yahoo, Facebook and other web properties had the time and software-engineering skills to work around its performance, scalability and management shortcomings, but many mainstream organizations did not. With the advent of Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR and any other number of Hadoop-based vendors, however, things began to change...