Notes about Cutting-Edge Technologies and Everything

To gather insights on the current and future state of open source software (OSS), we talked to 31 executives. This is nearly double the number we speak to for a research guide and believe this reiterates the popularity of, acceptance of, and demand for OSS. We began by asking, "What Open Source software do you use?" As you would expect, most respondents are using several versions of open source software. Here's what they told us: Apache Apache Cassandra, Elassandra  (ElasticSearch + Cassandra) , Spark, and Kafka  (as the core tech we provide through our managed service) are the big ones for us. We find that the governance arrangements and independence of the Apache Foundation make a great foundation for strong open source projects. 95% of what we do with big data is open source. We use  Apache Hadoop  and contribute back to grow skills and expertise. We use so much that it would be impossible to list. The core of our software is based on  Apache So...

Hadoop is on its way to becoming the de facto platform for the next-generation of data-based applications, but it’s not without flaws. Ironically, one of Hadoop’s biggest shortcomings now is also one of its biggest strengths going forward — the Hadoop Distributed File System. Within the Apache Software Foundation, HDFS is always improving in terms of performance and availability. Honestly, it’s probably fine for the majority of Hadoop workloads that are running in pilot projects, skunkworks projects or generally non-demanding environments. And technologies such as HBase that are built atop HDFS speak to its versatility as storage system even for non-MapReduce applications. But if the growing number of options for replacing HDFS signifies anything, it’s that HDFS isn’t quite where it needs to be. Some Hadoop users have strict demands around performance, availability and enterprise-grade features, while others aren’t keen of its direct-attached storage (DAS) architecture. Concerns arou...