Here is a true story… fuzzed just a little to disguise the real-life characters…
Three years ago… a friend calls to say: “Our new CxO just informed us that we needed to install a 1000-node Hadoop cluster in the next two months. I said… cool, what is the use case? He says… don’t argue with me… just get 1000 nodes up and running in the next 60 days. I say: there is no floorspace or power for that large a system. He says: do it in the next 60 days!”
My friend then decommissioned several systems that were doing productive, but expendable work, and installed 1000 nodes of Hadoop. And it sat there with no business problem to solve.
Today there is a little work running on the cluster… adding far less value than the expendable work that was decommissioned. The CxO is gone… with a glowing resume that says that he deployed one of the World’s largest Hadoop clusters.
When the hype over a technology gets so amplified that the hypers start hyping about the level of the hype… Hype-squared… you know that disillusionment cannot be far behind. Gartner is pretty spot on with their Hype Cycle (see here)… but Hadoop may survive, methinks.
Readers… any other good Hadoop hype stories to share?
Epic fail!!!
Surely every man+dog knows you need Hadoop *and* cloud for proper resume-embellishment 😉
On a serious note, Hadoop is a not-yet-ready-for-prime-time ‘solution’ looking for a problem in most cases, me thinks.
“What problem are we solving?” should always be the starting point, Hadoop or not.