Yahoo to distribute its version of Hadoop
Hadoop is an open-source grid computing project, and demand for Yahoo's take on that software has led the company to make available its own code.
Yahoo announced plans Wednesday to release an open-source version of its take on Hadoop, a grid-computing framework used to run many parts of its business.
Yahoo is a major force in the development of Hadoop, which is principally overseen by the Apache Software Foundation. Hadoop is essentially an open-source version of the software Google uses to run its Web indexing servers, and Yahoo uses it for much the same purpose internally.
Hadoop runs on tens of thousands of servers inside Yahoo, said Nigel Daley, quality and release engineering manager for Yahoo Grid Technologies, in a blog post Wednesday. That's a much larger implementation than other companies and organizations might wish to deploy, but at the same time they would like to benefit from the reliability tweaks that Yahoo has made to Hadoop in order to support its enormous Web properties.
"This distribution is largely a response to the numerous requests that we have received to share Yahoo!'s internally tested and scale-proven releases," Daley wrote. The code is available for download immediately here on Yahoo's site.