Hadoop

Hadoop is an open-source software framework used for distributed storage and processing of large datasets using the MapReduce programming model. It was developed by the Apache Software Foundation and was initially released in 2006. Hadoop is designed to scale up from a single server to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage.

Hadoop was created by Doug Cutting and Mike Cafarella and named after Cutting's son's toy elephant. It provides a robust, fault-tolerant system for data storage and processing, making it popular for big data applications. The core components of Hadoop include the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) for storage and the MapReduce framework for processing. HDFS is designed to store large files across multiple machines, ensuring data redundancy and reliability. MapReduce, on the other hand, splits the processing tasks into small sub-tasks that can be executed concurrently, significantly speeding up data processing operations. Hadoop's ability to handle vast amounts of structured and unstructured data, along with its cost-effectiveness and scalability, has made it a key technology in data analytics, business intelligence, and machine learning.