The Apache Software Foundation has released the first production version of Hadoop, the scalable, distributed computing software framework.
Hadoop connects thousands of servers to process big data for cloud
computing and other applications. It has been an Apache project for
the last six years. Version 1.0,
which is the first to be classed as enterprise-ready, was released at
the end of December but only formally announced on Wednesday.
"This release is the culmination of a lot of hard work and
co-operation from a vibrant Apache community group of dedicated
software developers and committers that has brought new levels of
stability and production expertise to the Hadoop project," Apache
Hadoop vice president Arun Murthy said in a statement.
The foundation said Hadoop had now "achieved the level of stability
and enterprise-readiness to earn the 1.0 designation".
Apache Hadoop is already employed
by many companies including Microsoft,
EMC,
Google,
Amazon,
IBM,
Yahoo
and Facebook, who have been instrumental in helping to develop and test the software prior to its release as fit for general consumption.
Murthy said the open-source Hadoop, which is distributed under the
Apache Licence v2.0, was "becoming the de facto data platform that
enables organisations to store, process and query vast torrents of
data", adding that the new release "represents an important step
forward in performance, stability and security".
This release is the culmination of a lot of hard work and co-operation from a vibrant Apache community group of dedicated software developers.
– Arun Murthy, Apache Hadoop
Although the purpose of releasing a finalised production version of
Hadoop is mostly to signal its general availability, version v1.0 also includes many bug fixes. It also
notably allows write access to the Hadoop Distributed File System
(HDFS) over HTTP, whereas the previous version of the 'webhdfs' file
system was read-only.
Yahoo is a major contributor to and user of Hadoop, having spun
off its Hadoop development team into an independent company called
Hortonworks last year.
"Achieving the 1.0 release status is a momentous achievement from
the Apache Hadoop community and the result of hard development work
and shared learnings over the years," Yahoo cloud chief Jay Rossiter
said. "Apache Hadoop will continue to be an important area of
investment for Yahoo. Today Hadoop powers every click at Yahoo."
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