Hadoop Operations

Chapter 3. MapReduce

MapReduce refers to two distinct things: the programming model (covered here) and the specific implementation of the framework (covered later in Introducing Hadoop MapReduce). Designed to simplify the development of large-scale, distributed, fault-tolerant data processing applications, MapReduce is foremost a way of writing applications. In MapReduce, developers write jobs that consist primarily of a map function and a reduce function, and the framework handles the gory details of parallelizing the work, scheduling parts of the job on worker machines, monitoring for and recovering from failures, and so forth. Developers are shielded from having to implement complex and repetitious code and instead, focus on algorithms and business logic. User-provided code is invoked by the framework rather than the other way around. This is much like Java application servers that invoke servlets upon receiving an HTTP request; the container is responsible for setup and teardown as well as providing a runtime environment for user-supplied code. Similarly, as servlet authors need not implement the low-level details of socket I/O, event handling loops, and complex thread coordination, MapReduce developers program to a well-defined, simple interface and the “container” does the heavy lifting.

The idea of MapReduce was defined in a paper written by two Google engineers in 2004, titled "MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters" (J. Dean, S. Ghemawat). The paper describes ...