With more and more people jumping on the bandwagon of big data it is very gratifying to see that Hadoop is gaining momentum every day.

Even more fascinating is too see how the idea of putting together a
bunch of service components on top of Hadoop proper is getting more and
more steam. IT and software development professionals are getting
better understanding of benefits that a flexible set of loosely
coupled yet compatible components provides when one needs to customize
a data processing solution at scale.

The biggest problem for most businesses trying to add Hadoop
infrastructure into their existing IT is a lack of the knowledge,
professional support, and/or clear understanding of what's out there on
the market to help you. Essentially, Hadoop exists in one incarnation -
this is the open-source project under the umbrella of Apache Software
Foundation (ASF). This is where all the innovations in Hadoop are coming
from. And essentially this is a source of profit for a few commercial
offerings.

What's wrong with the picture, you might ask? Well, the main issue with
most of those offerings are mostly two folds. They are
either immature and based on sometimes unfinished nor unreleased
Hadoop code, or provide no significant value add compare to Hadoop
proper available in source form from hadoop.apache.org.
And no matter if any of above (or both of them together) apply to a
commercial solution based on Hadoop, you can be sure of one thing: these
solutions will cost you literally tons of money - as much as 
$1k/node/year in some cases - for what is essentially available for
free.

"What about neat packages I can get from a commercial provider and
perhaps some training too?" one might ask. Well, yeah if you are willing
to pay top bucks per node for packaging bugs to get fixed or learn how to install packages on a virtual machine - go ahead by all means.

However, keep in mind that you always can get a set of packages for Hadoop produced by another open source project called Bigtop,
hosted by Apache. What essentially you get from it are packages for your Linux
distro, which can be easily installed on your cluster's nodes. A great
benefit is that you can easily trim your Hadoop stack to only include
what you need: Hadoop + Hive, or perhaps Hadoop + HBase (which will
automatically pick up Zookeper for you).

At any rate, the best part of the story isn't a set of packages that can
be installed: after all this is what packages are usually being created
for, right? The problem with the packages or other forms of component
distribution is compatibility: you don't know in advance if A-package will nicely
work with B-package v.1.2 unless somebody has tested this assumption.
Even then, testing environment might be significantly different from
your production environment and then all bets are off. Unless - again -
you're willing to pay through your nose to someone who's willing to get
it for you. And that's where true miracle of something like BigTop is
coming for a rescue.

Before I'll explain more, I wanna step back a bit and look upon
some recent history. A couple of years ago Yahoo's Hadoop development
team had to address an issue of putting together working and
well-validated Hadoop stack including a number of components developed
by different engineering organizations with their own development
schedule and integration criteria. The main integration point of all of
the pieces was the operations team which was in charge of a big number of
cluster deployments, provisioning and support. Without their own QA
staff they were oftentimes at mercy of an assumed code or configuration
quality coming from all the corners of the company. Even with
a chance of the high quality of all these components there were no
guarantees that they will work together as expected once put together on a cluster. And indeed, integration problems were many.

That's were a small team of engineers including yours truly who put together
a prototype of a system called FIT (Final Integration Testing). The
system essentially allowed you to pick up a packaged component you wanted
to validate against your cluster environment and perform the deployment,
configuration, and testing with the integration scenarios provided by
either the component's owner or your own team.

The approach was so effective that the project was continued and funded
further in the form of HIT (Hadoop Integration Testing). At which point
two of us have left for what seemed like a greener pasture back then.

We thought the idea was the real deal so we have continued on the path
of developing a less custom and more adoptable technology based on open
standards such as Maven and Groovy. Here you can find the slides from the talk
we gave at eBay about a year ago. The presentation is putting the
concept of Hadoop data stack in open writing for the first time, as well as
defines stacks customization and validation technology. When this presentation
were given we already had well working mechanism of creating, deploying, and validating both packaged and non-packaged Hadoop components.

BigTop - open-sourced for the second time just a few months ago and
based on our project above - has added up a packaging creation layer on
top of the stack validation product. This, of course, makes your life
even easier. And even more so with a number of Puppet recipes allowing
you to deploy and configure your cluster in highly efficient and
automatic manner. I encourage you to check it out.

BigTop has been successfully used for validating release of Apache
Hadoop 0.20.205 which has become a foundation of Hadoop 1.0.0
Another release of Hadoop - 0.22 - was using BigTop for release
candidates validation and so on.

On top of "just packages" BigTop now produces ready to go VMs pre-installed with Hadoop stack for different Linux distributions: just download one and instantiate your very own cluster in minutes! We'll tell about it next time.

I encourage to check BigTop project, contribute to it your ideas, time, and knowledge!

Cross-posted