Two terms that can help one understand what Hadoop is: Faster processing and huge data storage. Hadoop is an open-source software system which allows processing and storing massive data units in an organized manner over large blocks of commodity hardware. Big names like Yahoo, Google, Twitter and eBay, etc. make use of Hadoop and many other small and big organizations are following their lead to do the same. Hadoop has the capability to store and process not just numerical or structured data but also several others kinds.
It was in the year 2008 that Yahoo launched Hadoop as an open source project but currently, the framework as well as the technology of this software are managed by Apache Software Foundation which is a nonprofit community of software contributors and developers.
Importance and benefits of Hadoop
The wide range of benefits and advantages that Hadoop offers, it is no doubt that it has become one of the most popular technologies ever since its launch. Of course, the biggest reason behind this is its ability to handle massive amounts of data but besides this, there are a few more reasons. They are given as follows:
Flexibility of storage: In Hadoop, one doesn’t have to preprocess data before storing it. This means that unlike other databases, there is no need to preprocess data like images, text and videos. One can store any amounts of data and then decide the manner in which it has to be stored later on.
Low cost: Hadoop is a free, open source framework which makes use of commodity hardware to store the data. This very fact makes it a very popular choice among users across the world.
Scalability: Another benefits or advantages of Hadoop is that it is highly scalable. This means that users can easily grow their systems by the additional of more nodes. This feature requires hardly any administration and is hence easy.
Computing power: Hadoop has the capability of processing even very large amounts of data very quickly due to its distributed computing model. The more the number of computing nodes one uses, the more he processing power gets increased.
Data protection: Another benefit due to which Hadoop is well known and widely used is that it offers inherent data protection. All the application processing, as well as the data, is protected against the failure in hardware. Also, the system has self-healing capabilities. This means that if any node goes down, the system makes arrangement to make sure that the computing does not get interrupted.
Components of Hadoop
Hadoop runs on three most basic components which one gets on downloading the system. They are given as follows:
YARN is a resource management system which helps to handle resource requests and schedules them.
MapReduce – another component of Hadoop is known as MapReduce. This is a software programming system which aids processing of huge sets of data in parallel.
HDFS is a distributed file system which is based on Java and has the capability of storing any data without prior structuring.
