Hadoop is everywhere, especially this past week. Partnerships, products, clouds — it was nearly impossible to keep up with the news coming out of New York. It’s further evidence that Hadoop is cementing its role as the enterprise’s big data operating system. And, while I’ve been historically outspoken on Hadoop’s features and delivery platforms, what excites me most about the ecosystem is actually the release of Hadoop 2.2.0 (aka Hadoop 2).
This might be surprising, because Hadoop 2 is not a blow-your-socks-off release. It is not packed with revolutionary new features from a user perspective. Instead, its greatest innovation is a glorious refactoring of some internal plumbing. But that plumbing grants the community of Hadoop developers the pathways they need to address some of Hadoops greatest shortcomings in comparison to both the commercial and the internal Google tools that Hadoop was derived from.