Hi Folks,
I'm pleased to announce that after some reflection, Yahoo! has
decided to
discontinue the "The Yahoo Distribution of Hadoop" and focus on
Apache
Hadoop. We plan to remove all references to a Yahoo distribution
from our
website (developer.yahoo.com/hadoop), close our github repo (
yahoo.github.com/hadoop-common) and focus on working more closely
with the
Apache community. Our intent is to return to helping Apache
produce binary
releases of Apache Hadoop that are so bullet proof that Yahoo and
other
production Hadoop users can run them unpatched on their clusters.
Until Hadoop 0.20, Yahoo committers worked as release masters to
produce
binary Apache Hadoop releases that the entire community used on their
clusters. As the community grew, we have experiment with using the
"Yahoo! Distribution of Hadoop" as the vehicle to share our work.
Unfortunately, Apache is no longer the obvious place to go for Hadoop
releases. The Yahoo! team wants to return to a world where anyone
can
download and directly use releases of Hadoop from Apache. We want to
contribute to the stabilization and testing of those releases. We
also want
to share our regular program of sustaining engineering that
backports minor
feature enhancements into new dot releases on a regular basis, so
that the
world sees regular improvements coming from Apache every few
months, not
years.
Recently the Apache Hadoop community has been very turbulent. Over
the
last few months we have been developing Hadoop enhancements in our
internal
git repository while doing a complete review of our options. Our
commitment
to open sourcing our work was never in doubt (see http://yhoo.it/e8p3Dd)
,
but the future of the "Yahoo distribution of Hadoop" was far from
clear.
We've concluded that focusing on Apache Hadoop is the way forward.
We
believe that more focus on communicating our goals to the Apache
Hadoop
community, and more willingness to compromise on how we get to
those goals,
will help us get back to making Hadoop even better.
Unfortunately, we now have to sort out how to contribute several
person-years worth of work to Apache to let us unwind the Yahoo! git
repositories. We currently run two lines of Hadoop development, our
sustaining program (hadoop-0.20-sustaining) and hadoop-future.
Hadoop-0.20-sustaining is the stable version of Hadoop we currently
run on
Yahoo's 40,000 nodes. It contains a series of fixes and
enhancements that
are all backwards compatible with our "Hadoop 0.20 with security".
It is
our most stable and high performance release of Hadoop ever. We've
expended
a lot of energy finding and fixing bugs in it this year. We have
initiated
the process of contributing this work to Apache in the branch:
hadoop/common/branches/branch-0.20-security. We've proposed
calling this
the 20.100 release. Once folks have had a chance to try this out
and we've
had a chance to respond to their feedback, we plan to create 20.100
release
candidates and ask the community to vote on making them Apache
releases.
Hadoop-future is our new feature branch. We are working on a set
of new
features for Hadoop to improve its availability, scalability and
interoperability to make Hadoop more usable in mission critical
deployments.
You're going to see another burst of email activity from us as we
work to
get hadoop-future patches socialized, reviewed and checked in.
These bulk
checkins are exceptional. They are the result of us striving to be
more
transparent. Once we've merged our hadoop-future and hadoop-0.20-
sustaining
work back into Apache, folks can expect us to return to our regular
development cadence. Looking forward, we plan to socialize our
roadmaps
regularly, actively synchronize our work with other active Hadoop
contributors and develop our code collaboratively, directly in
Apache.
In summary, our decision to discontinue the "Yahoo! Distribution of
Hadoop"
is a commitment to working more effectively with the Apache Hadoop
community. Our goal is to make Apache Hadoop THE open source
platform for
big data.
Thanks,
E14
--
PS Here is a draft list of key features in hadoop-future:
* HDFS-1052 - Federation, the ability to support much more storage
per
Hadoop cluster.
* HADOOP-6728 - A the new metrics framework
* MAPREDUCE-1220 - Optimizations for small jobs
---
PPS This is cross-posted on our blog: http://yhoo.it/i9Ww8W
