This book is here to help you make sense of Hadoop and use it to solve your big data problems. It's a really exciting time to work with data processing technologies such as Hadoop. The ability to apply complex analytics to large data sets—once the monopoly of large corporations and government agencies—is now possible through free open source software (OSS).
But because of the seeming complexity and pace of change in this area, getting a grip on the basics can be somewhat intimidating. That's where this book comes in, giving you an understanding of just what Hadoop is, how it works, and how you can use it to extract value from your data now.
In addition to an explanation of core Hadoop, we also spend several chapters exploring other technologies that either use Hadoop or integrate with it. Our goal is to give you an understanding not just of what Hadoop is but also how to use it as a part of your broader technical infrastructure.
A complementary technology is the use of cloud computing, and in particular, the offerings from Amazon Web Services. Throughout the book, we will show you how to use these services to host your Hadoop workloads, demonstrating that not only can you process large data volumes, but also you don't actually need to buy any physical hardware to do so.
This book comprises of three main parts: chapters 1 through 5, which cover the core of Hadoop and how it works, chapters 6 and 7, which cover the more operational aspects of Hadoop, and chapters 8 through 11, which look at the use of Hadoop alongside other products and technologies.
Chapter 1, What It's All About, gives an overview of the trends that have made Hadoop and cloud computing such important technologies today.
Chapter 2, Getting Hadoop Up and Running, walks you through the initial setup of a local Hadoop cluster and the running of some demo jobs. For comparison, the same work is also executed on the hosted Hadoop Amazon service.
Chapter 3, Understanding MapReduce, goes inside the workings of Hadoop to show how MapReduce jobs are executed and shows how to write applications using the Java API.
Chapter 4, Developing MapReduce Programs, takes a case study of a moderately sized data set to demonstrate techniques to help when deciding how to approach the processing and analysis of a new data source.
Chapter 5, Advanced MapReduce Techniques, looks at a few more sophisticated ways of applying MapReduce to problems that don't necessarily seem immediately applicable to the Hadoop processing model.
Chapter 6, When Things Break, examines Hadoop's much-vaunted high availability and fault tolerance in some detail and sees just how good it is by intentionally causing havoc through killing processes and intentionally using corrupt data.
Chapter 7, Keeping Things Running, takes a more operational view of Hadoop and will be of most use for those who need to administer a Hadoop cluster. Along with demonstrating some best practice, it describes how to prepare for the worst operational disasters so you can sleep at night.
Chapter 8, A Relational View On Data With Hive, introduces Apache Hive, which allows Hadoop data to be queried with a SQL-like syntax.
Chapter 9, Working With Relational Databases, explores how Hadoop can be integrated with existing databases, and in particular, how to move data from one to the other.
Chapter 10, Data Collection with Flume, shows how Apache Flume can be used to gather data from multiple sources and deliver it to destinations such as Hadoop.
Chapter 11, Where To Go Next, wraps up the book with an overview of the broader Hadoop ecosystem, highlighting other products and technologies of potential interest. In addition, it gives some ideas on how to get involved with the Hadoop community and to get help.
What you need for this book
As we discuss the various Hadoop-related software packages used in this book, we will describe the particular requirements for each chapter. However, you will generally need somewhere to run your Hadoop cluster.
In the simplest case, a single Linux-based machine will give you a platform to explore almost all the exercises in this book. We assume you have a recent distribution of Ubuntu, but as long as you have command-line Linux familiarity any modern distribution will suffice.
Some of the examples in later chapters really need multiple machines to see things working, so you will require access to at least four such hosts. Virtual machines are completely acceptable; they're not ideal for production but are fine for learning and exploration.
Since we also explore Amazon Web Services in this book, you can run all the examples on EC2 instances, and we will look at some other more Hadoop-specific uses of AWS throughout the book. AWS services are usable by anyone, but you will need a credit card to sign up!
We assume you are reading this book because you want to know more about Hadoop at a hands-on level; the key audience is those with software development experience but no prior exposure to Hadoop or similar big data technologies.
For developers who want to know how to write MapReduce applications, we assume you are comfortable writing Java programs and are familiar with the Unix command-line interface. We will also show you a few programs in Ruby, but these are usually only to demonstrate language independence, and you don't need to be a Ruby expert.
For architects and system administrators, the book also provides significant value in explaining how Hadoop works, its place in the broader architecture, and how it can be managed operationally. Some of the more involved techniques in Chapter 4, Developing MapReduce Programs, and Chapter 5, Advanced MapReduce Techniques, are probably of less direct interest to this audience.
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