Apache announces Hadoop 1.0

THE APACHE SOFTWARE FOUNDATION (ASF) has announced Hadoop 1.0.

The Hadoop open source software project has reached the milestone of its first full release after six years of development. Hadoop is a software framework for reliable, scalable and distributed computing under a free licence. The release 1.0 number is significant because it means that Apache has declared Hadoop ready for the enterprise. Apache describes it as "a foundation of cloud computing".

"This release is the culmination of a lot of hard work and cooperation 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," said Arun Murthy, VP of Apache Hadoop.

"Hadoop is becoming the de facto data platform that enables organizations to store, process and query vast torrents of data, and the new release represents an important step forward in performance, stability and security," he added.

Apache Hadoop allows for the distributed processing of large data sets, often petabytes, across clusters of computers using a simple Java-based programming model.

It connects thousands of servers together to achieve super computing power allowing businesses to manage, store and crunch though data in an efficient and economical way.

The Hadoop framework is used by some big name organisations including Amazon, Ebay, IBM, Apple, Facebook and Yahoo. These firms, as well as others, have helped test and develop the software to get it stable enough for version 1.0.

Yahoo has significantly contributed to the project and hosts the largest Hadoop production environment with more than 42,000 nodes.

Version 1.0 includes a long list of bug fixes from previous versions along with performance enhancements, security and support for writing to the Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS), which previously was read-only.

Jay Rossiter, SVP of the cloud platform group at Yahoo said, "Apache Hadoop will continue to be an important area of investment for Yahoo. Today Hadoop powers every click at Yahoo, helping to deliver personalized content and experiences to more than 700 million consumers worldwide." µ