THE Grıll
Doug
Cutting
Hadoop’s creator
discusses how the
technology is making
its presence felt
industrywide.
The most interesting thing
people don’t know about you:
One summer I worked in a salmon
cannery 14 hours a day while
camping in a swamp.
Favorite technology:
The bicycle derailleur.
Favorite nonwork pastime:
Walking, cycling, skiing or
swimming with friends.
Favorite vice: It’s a tie
between an espresso at 9 a.m.
and a beer at 5 p.m.
Four people you’d invite to
dinner together: Thomas Pynchon
(author), Bootsy Collins (musician),
John Muir (naturalist) and my wife.
Best movie ever: Once Upon a Time
in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968).
DOUG CUTTING , creator of the open-source Hadoop framework that allows enter- prises to store and analyze petabytes of unstructured data, led the team that built one of the world’s largest Hadoop clusters while he was at Yahoo. Formerly an engi- neer at Excite, Apple and Xerox PARC, Cutting also developed Lucene and Nutch,
two open-source search engine technologies now being managed by the Apache Foundation.
Cutting is now an architect at Cloudera, which sells and supports a commercial version of
Hadoop. Here he talks about the reasons for the surging enterprise interest in Hadoop.
How would you describe Hadoop to a CIO or a CFO? Why should enterprises care about
it? At a really simple level, it lets you affordably save and process vastly more data
than you could before. With more data and the ability to process it, companies can
see more, they can learn more, they can do more. [With Hadoop] you can start to do
