Apache Hadoop is an open source Java framework for processing and querying vast amounts of data on large clusters of commodity hardware. Hadoop is a top level Apache project, initiated and led by Yahoo! and Doug Cutting. It relies on an active community of contributors from all over the world for its success.

With a significant technology investment by Yahoo!, Apache Hadoop has become an enterprise-ready cloud computing technology. It is becoming the industry de facto framework for Big Data processing.

Hadoop changes the economics and the dynamics of large-scale computing. Its impact can be boiled down to four salient characteristics. Hadoop enables scalable, cost-effective, flexible, fault-tolerant solutions.