3 big data platforms look beyond Hadoop

A distributed file system, a MapReduce programming framework, and an extended family of tools for processing huge data sets on large clusters of commodity hardware, Hadoop has been synonymous with “big data” for more than a decade. But no technology can hold the spotlight forever.

While Hadoop remains an essential part of the big data platforms, and the major Hadoop vendors—namely Cloudera, Hortonworks, and MapR—have changed their platforms dramatically. Once-peripheral projects like Apache Spark and Apache Kafka have become the new stars, and the focus has turned to other ways to drill into data and extract insight.