"Why the days are numbered for Hadoop as we know it"I know GigaOM like to provoke scandals sometimes, we all remember some other unforgettable piece, but there is something behind it...
Hadoop today (after SOA not so long ago) is one of the worst case of an abused buzzword ever known to men. It's everything, everywhere, can cure illnesses and do "big-data" at the same time! Wow! Actually Hadoop is a software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications, derived from Google's MapReduce and Google File System (GFS) papers.
My take from the article is this: Hadoop is a foundation, low-level platform. I used the word "platform" just because of a lack of a better word. Wait there is a great word that captures it all!
This word is Assembler.
When computers begun 70 years ago or so, Assembly is the mother of all programming languages, Assembler made it work in real world computers, silicone and copper. In the world of Big Data, map-reduce, massive distribution and parallelism is the mother of all living things (Assembly). And Hadoop enables it to actually run in the real world (Assembler)...
Like Assembler, Hadoop core is far from being really usable. Doing something real, good, working, repeatable with it requires skills that only a few people can really master (Like good Assembler programmers, back in 1960's).
While I consider myself lucky to have the chance to actually punch cards with brilliant(?) Assembler code, many of today's brightest minds in Silicone Valleys around the world never wrote one opcode. They're all using PHP, Ruby, Java and node.js, which are great "wrappers" around good old Assembly to bring programming, innovation, disruptiveness - to the masses, make the whole world a better place. It's how it should be.
Hadoop will die only if data and big data dies. Nonsense. Data is by far the most important asset organizations have. Facebook as well as Bank Of America will be worth a fraction of their value in minutes if they loose the same fraction of their data. Both won't be able to compete if they can't be intelligent and analyze their data that multiplies every (low number) days/weeks/months. The data makes a business intelligent and Hadoop helps exactly there.
Hadoop is the Assembler of all analytical big data processing, ETL and queries. The potential around it and its ecosystem is literally unlimited, tons of innovation and disruptiveness are poured by startups and communities all over, like Splunk, HBase, Cloudera, Hive, Hadapt, and many many more. And we're just in the "FORTRAN" phase...
