Declining Adoption: Is Hadoop Going Through a Mid-Life Crisis?

Hadoop is slowly becoming outdated with the advent of disruptive tech like cloud computing

Hadoop, is an open-source software framework that rose to popularity almost a decade ago. Apache Hadoop was a groundbreaking innovation back then, wherein businesses struggled to process huge loads of data and faced storage issues. It redefined how enterprises processed, analyzed, and stored data by providing Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) for storage and MapReduce for data analytics and processing. According to PR Newswire report, more than half of the Fortune 50 companies adopted Hadoop by 2012.

Cloudera emerged as the first dedicated company to Hadoop in 2008, and MapR and Hortonworks followed. Hadoop technology became a favourite of Fortune 500 companies and yet they are announcing to dump the technology. After going through such a pathbreaking journey and getting adored so much, why is Hadoop experiencing a considerable decline today?

Changes That Pioneered the Collapse

The emergence of the cloud has a pivotal role to play in the decline of Hadoop adoption. In 2018, Twitter announced its migration to Google Cloud to enhance productivity and address its growing needs. Further, they also stated that their Hadoop file system stores more than 300 petabytes of data and they are moving Hadoop computing systems to Google Cloud.

This is not a lone case since the popularisation of cloud services, many companies decided to shift to the cloud for better big data solutions and advanced data analytics. Next pathway, an automated cloud migration company recently declared the enhanced capabilities of Crawler360™ and SHIFT™, their two migration technologies, for hassle-free quick migration from Hadoop to the desired cloud platform.

While speaking to The Next Platform, Vinay Mathur, Chief Strategy Officer of Next Pathway says, "It is promised to be more than it ended up being. And as data volumes and analytics requirements increase in complexity it simply doesn't work anymore." According to The Next Platform report, their conversation with the upper end of companies in Fortune 500 resulted in the realization that they are losing interest in Hadoop.

The cloud promises scalable and efficient big data processing compared to the on-premise Hadoop technology that was often blamed for its maintenance expenses. It is also does not work very well with iterative data and for big loaves of small data sets, it is often labeled as an inefficient solution. The increasing demand for real-time data analytics also played a role in the declining interest in Hadoop.

Many times operators dump large scales of unstructured data into the distributed file system and this piles up increasing the complexity to deliver solutions. With the cloud there is less confusion and while it also provides a scalable cost-efficient platform.

Is Hadoop Dead?

Oh My! Nobody should be that pessimistic. A technology like Hadoop might evolve but not completely vanish. The Allied Market Research report reveals that the global Hadoop market is expected to reach USD 340.35 billion by 2027 compared to USD 26.74 billion in 2019, growing at a CAGR of 37.5% from 2020-2027. Isn't it contradictory? Hadoop might be going through a mid-life crisis that could end in the technology being more mature.

Although the adoption might decline, Hadoop is not going to disappear since it can still be used for abundant data storage if not for analytics. The coming years might witness enterprises using hybrid methods for data storage and analytics by leveraging both cloud-based and on-premise infrastructures. Here, It will have a considerable scope since it is a well-accepted tech with a cost-efficient and scalable data storage system.