Some Interesting Facts About Hadoop MapReduce [pdf]

http://davidfrico.com/hadoop-considerations.pdf

by snydeq • 13 years ago

9 5 13 years ago

davidfrico.com

stevedomin• 13 years ago

This is quite an interesting document. I'd love to have pov from Hadoop "power-user" on this.

blibble• 13 years ago

I'd agree with most of his points, but he has conflated mapreduce, yarn and hdfs into "hadoop".

the "assembly language" stuff is only accurate if you're writing raw mapreduce jobs, but he's ignored projects like hbase, hive, pig, impala and cascading.

the HA issues with the namenode have mostly gone away with CDH4.1.

the one thing that's a complete pain is the lack of snapshotting functionality in hdfs, making consistent backups nearly impossible.

the APIs for hdfs and yarn are poorly designed and pretty buggy, they're very obtuse and hard to debug. if you manage to find any documentation it's almost certainly wrong for the version you're using.

nine times out of ten it's quicker to step into the source code rather than digging into the documentation.

however once you've abstracted away the poor APIs it does work very well, and the pay is good...

shuzchen• 13 years ago

I'm not a "power-user", but I'm in the process of building a pretty big product powered by hadoop (more specifically, mrjob and amazon's EMR).

I have a hard time reading this as anything but satire. The author definitely knows a lot about hadoop, yet displays a misunderstanding of such a basic piece of it (conflating hadoop with map-reduce).

Just a few key things I can refute:

Hadoop as wasteful: production systems are built to withstand the expected peaks of traffic (i.e., some website that sees a huge influx when the east coast wakes up on monday morning will design with that load+buffer in mind), which means that ~90% (probably even higher!) of the time resources are underutilized. even personally my own laptop isn't chugging at 100% on all cores all day every day, I don't see how anybody expects any collection of computers to do so. On the flip side, this is being offset by platforms like AWS. When I run map-reduce jobs on hadoop, I spin up an EMR jobflow, run a few tasks and then shut it down. Presumably, somebody else gets to use those machines after I'm done.

Lack of third party support: Honestly, with mrjob and EMR, I've never needed to deal with any hadoop management, setup, maintenance or scaling. Also, all my code is python, I've not had to write a line of Java. And these aren't the only tools built on top of hadoop.

Hadoop as deprecated: there are certainly more big-data crunching platforms coming out nowadays, but hadoop is mature, stable, and still going strong. Also, the basic map-reduce framework it's based on is not going anywhere soon. I mean, I cut my teeth on map-reduce with mongodb, and it seems most other nosql solutions there are going that route for complicated things their standard query engine can't support.

VonCuattyaf9• 13 years ago

Not sure what this is about. Most of his criticism can be made against any form of computing clusters. Hadoop is optimized for processing raw unstructered data fast. It's not an alternative to SQL and never was. It's also optimized for data throughput and not like MPI for processing power.

MapReduce is an algorithm or paradigm that has to fit your problem. It is not the fault of Hadoop that it is over hyped and mis-used for other problems.

Hadoop is not a database or a datastore. If you want to extract data out of e.g. web-pages Hadoop is a great tool as it abstracts away the problems of distributing the algorithm and the data for you. Google (re)invented MapReduce and is a search engine, Yahoo was also a search engine. Hadoop solved Yahoo's problems.

I really don't understand the point he's trying to make. If you want to run your business database from Hadoop you are crazy. If you have 5 terabyte of click data from your website and you want to cluster and analyze this data Hadoop (or better Hbase) can help you to solve this problem.

It is a different paradigm. It it not like Java programming. It uses Java to implement the MapReduce paradigm. If you don't want to think about how to fit your problem into this paradigm or if your problem is not solvable using Hadoop don't use it.

If you want to build a search engine Hadoop is a great fit. If you want to replace your SQL database with Hadoop you are crazy.

Also if the network is the bottleneck in your Hadoop cluster you did something wrong. Hadoop is designed for data locality. Usally the output of a Mapper consists of less data than the input.

* I've used Hadoop as a student for several academic projects. Mostly information retrieval. So I can't comment on "real world buisseness" usage. I've just have the impression that Hadoop is pretty overhyped and not well understood.

ripperdoc• 13 years ago

And if you click back to his website, you'll find that it seems to have been solely built using WordArt, which is quite an impressive feat!

Some Interesting Facts About Hadoop MapReduce [pdf]

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