Learning MapReduce: Everywhere and For Everyone
From the post:
Tom White, author of Hadoop: The Definitive Guide, recently celebrated his five-year anniversary at Cloudera with a blog post reflecting on the early days of Big Data and what has changed and remained since 2008. Having just seen Tom in New York at the biggest and best Hadoop World to date, I’m struck by the poignancy of his earliest memories. Even then, Cloudera’s projects were focused on broadening adoption and building the community by writing effective training material, integrating with other systems, and building on the core open source. The founding team had a vision to make Apache Hadoop the focal point of an accessible, powerful, enterprise-ready Big Data platform.
Today, Cloudera is working harder than ever to help companies deploy Hadoop as part of an Enterprise Data Hub. We’re just as committed to a healthy and vibrant open-source community, have a lively partner ecosystem over 700, and have contributed innovations that make data access and analysis faster, more secure, more relevant, and, ultimately, more profitable.
However, with all these successes in driving Hadoop towards the mainstream and providing a new and dynamic data engine, the fact remains that broadening adoption at the end-user level remains job one. Even as Cloudera unifies the Big Data stack, the availability of talent to drive operations and derive full value from massive data falls well short of the enormous demand. As more companies across industries adopt Hadoop and build out their Big Data strategies focused on the Enterprise Data Hub, Cloudera has expanded its commitment to educating technologists of all backgrounds on Hadoop, its applications, and its systems.
A Partnership to Cultivate Hadoop Talent
We at Cloudera University are proud to announce a new partnership with Udacity, a leader in open, online professional education. We believe in Udacity’s vision to democratize professional development by making technical training affordable and accessible to everyone, and this model will enable us to reach aspiring Big Data practitioners around the world who want to expand their skills into Hadoop.
Our first Udacity course, Introduction to Hadoop and MapReduce, guides learners from an understanding of Big Data to the basics of Hadoop, all the way through writing your first MapReduce program. We partnered directly with Udacity’s development team to build the most engaging online Hadoop course available, including demonstrative instruction, interactive quizzes, an interview with Hadoop co-founder Doug Cutting, and a hands-on project using live data. Most importantly, the lessons are self-paced, open, and based on Cloudera’s insights into industry best practices and professional requirements.
Cloudera, and to be fair, others, have adopted a strategy of self-interest that is also ethical.
They are literally giving away the knowledge and training to use a free product. Think of it as a rising tide that floats all boats higher.
The more popular and widely use Hadoop/MapReduce become, the greater the demand for professional training and services from Cloudera (and others).
You may experiment or even run a local cluster, but if you are a Hadoop newbie, who are you going to call when it is a mission-critical application? (Hopefully professionals but there’s no guarantee on that.)
You don’t have to build silos or closed communities to be economically viable.
Delivering professional services for a popular technology seems to do the trick.