Apache Hadoop is an open source software framework for data-intensive distributed applications originally created by Doug Cutting to support his work on Nutch, an open source Web search engine. To meet Nutch’s multimachine processing requirements, Cutting implemented a MapReduce facility and a distributed file system that together became Hadoop. He named it after his son’s toy elephant. Through MapReduce, Hadoop distributes Big Data in pieces over a series of nodes running on commodity hardware. Hadoop is now among the most popular technologies for storing the structured, semi-structured and unstructured data that comprise Big Data. Hadoop is available under the Apache License 2.0.