Kevin Sitto

Kevin Sitto is a Field Solutions Engineer with Pivotal Software, providing consulting services to help folks understand and address their big data needs.

He lives in Maryland with his wife and two kids and enjoys making homebrew beer when he's not writing books about big data.

Navigating the Hadoop ecosystem

A field guide to the Apache Hadoop projects, subprojects, and related technologies.

Marshall Presser, co-author of Field Guide to Hadoop, contributed to this post.

IT managers, developers, data analysts, and system architects are encountering the largest and most disruptive change in data analysis since the ascendency of the relational database in early 1980s — the challenge to process, organize, and take full advantage of big data.  With 73% of organizations making big data investments in 2014 and 2015, this transition is occurring at a historic pace, requiring new ways of thinking to go along with new tools and techniques.

Hadoop is the cornerstone of this change to a landscape of systems and skills we’ve traditionally possessed. In the nine short years since the project revolutionized data science at Yahoo!, an entire ecosystem of technologies has sprung up around it. While the power of this ecosystem is plain to see, it can be a challenge to navigate your way through the complex and rapidly evolving collection of projects and products.

A couple years ago, my coworker Marshall Presser and I started our journey into the world of Hadoop. Like many folks, we found the company we worked for was making a major investment in the Hadoop ecosystem, and we had to find a way to adapt. We started in all of the typical places — blog posts, trade publications, Wikipedia articles, and project documentation. Quickly, we learned that many of these sources are often highly biased, either too shallow or too deep, and just plain inconsistent. Read more…