This chapter provided a technical overview of Hadoop. We discussed the core components and core concepts that are fundamental to Hadoop, such as MapReduce and HDFS. We also looked at the technical challenges and considerations of using Hadoop. While it may appear simple in concept, the inner workings and a formal administration of a Hadoop architecture can be fairly complex. In this chapter we highlighted a few of them.

We concluded with a hands-on exercise on Hadoop using the Cloudera Distribution. For this tutorial, we used the CDH Virtual Machine downloaded earlier from Cloudera's website.

In the next chapter, we will look at NoSQL, an alternative or a complementary solution to Hadoop depending upon your individual and/or organization al needs. While Hadoop offers a far richer set of capabilities, if your intended use case(s) can be done with simply NoSQL solutions, the latter may be an easier choice in terms of the effort required.