Joining Cloudera

By Doug Cutting

I will be leaving Yahoo! at the end of this month to join Cloudera.

About five years ago I was working with Mike Cafarella on Apache Nutch, an open-source web-search engine. Initially we were able to crawl and index on four machines in parallel, but with a lot of manual steps. Inspired by two Google papers, we implemented a distributed filesystem and MapReduce implementation that automated most of these steps. Operation became much simpler, and we were then able to easily run Nutch on twenty machines, with near-linear scaling.

But to scale to the many billions of pages in the web we’d need to be able to run it on thousands of machines. And the more we worked on it the more I realized that would take a lot more developers and resources than we had to make this happen.

Yahoo! proposed to fill this gap. Eric Baldeschwieler led a team with talented folks, like Owen O’Malley, Sameer Paranjpye, and Nigel Daley. Eric said he’d dedicate his team to scaling this system to be able to process the full web. So, three and half years ago, I joined Yahoo! to help make this happen.

We exceeded my dreams. First we moved the distributed computing code out of Nutch into a new Apache project christened Hadoop. Then we set out to improve scalability, performance, and reliability, all the while adding many features. After one year Hadoop was used daily by many research groups within Yahoo!. After two years it generated Yahoo!’s web search index, achieving web-scale. Now, after three years, Hadoop holds the big-data sort record and the project has become a de-facto industry standard for big-data computing, used by scores of companies. The recent Hadoop Summit was attended by over 750 people from around the world.

Many folks at Yahoo! were instrumental in this story, including: Raymie Stata, Dhruba Borthakur, Arun C Murthy, Devaraj Das, Raghu Angadi, Hairong Kuang, Konstantin Shvachko, Runping Qi, Chris Douglas, Allen Wittenauer, Sharad Agarwal and Hemanth Yamijala, to name just a few. Yahoo! deserves enormous and ongoing thanks for the key role it plays in making Hadoop useful.

Now Hadoop is a thriving open-source project, with large and diverse developer and user communities. Going forward, Cloudera presents an opportunity to work with a wider range of Hadoop users. I hope to help synthesize these many voices into a project that best serves all.

Hadoop has grown to be a large, active, project very quickly, but it is still a young project. At Cloudera I will be well positioned to help it mature. This move will not fundamentally change my day-to-day activities. I will continue to work on Hadoop, working closely with developers from Yahoo! and elsewhere to build great software.

46 Responses to “Joining Cloudera”

  1. Doug Cutting joins Cloudera » Cloudera Hadoop & Big Data Blog Says:

    [...] — that Doug Cutting, co-founder of the Apache Hadoop project and creator of Nutch and Lucene, has agreed to join Cloudera beginning on September 1, 2009. Doug’s contributions to Hadoop over the [...]

  2. Otis Gospodnetic Says:

    Congratulations Doug! :)

  3. 451 CAOS Links (caostheory) 's status on Monday, 10-Aug-09 21:06:51 UTC - Identi.ca Says:

    [...] http://blog.lucene.com/2009/08/10/joining-cloudera/ [...]

  4. Yoav Shapira Says:

    Congratulations, and good luck!

  5. Lots of Search News Today! | The Noisy Channel Says:

    [...] bring us to the last news item: Doug Cutting is leaving Yahoo for Cloudera, where he’ll continue to work on Hadoop. According to his blog post about it, [...]

  6. Why The Brain Behind Hadoop Left Yahoo | Family Learning Center Says:

    [...] his blog post explaining the move, Cutting specifically states that he joined Yahoo in order to get the resources [...]

  7. Ricardo Niederberger Cabral Says:

    Good luck and keep up the good work!

  8. Why The Brain Behind Hadoop Left Yahoo | yKvz Blog Says:

    [...] his blog post explaining the move, Cutting specifically states that he joined Yahoo in order to get the resources [...]

  9. Why The Brain Behind Hadoop Left Yahoo | koala eye Says:

    [...] his blog post explaining the move, Cutting specifically states that he joined Yahoo in order to get the resources [...]

  10. WebHosts 2009» Blog Archive » Why The Brain Behind Hadoop Left Yahoo Says:

    [...] his blog post explaining the move, Cutting specifically states that he joined Yahoo in order to get the resources [...]

  11. Why The Brain Behind Hadoop Left Yahoo - ComponentGear.com Feed - ComponentGear.com Says:

    [...] his blog post explaining the move, Cutting specifically states that he joined Yahoo in order to get the resources [...]

  12. Why The Brain Behind Hadoop Left Yahoo | Social Nibble Says:

    [...] his blog post explaining the move, Cutting specifically states that he joined Yahoo in order to get the resources [...]

  13. Why The Brain Behind Hadoop Left Yahoo | google android os blog Says:

    [...] his blog post explaining the move, Cutting specifically states that he joined Yahoo in order to get the resources [...]

  14. mariano Says:

    Congratulations Doug… excelent decision :)

  15. Doug Cutting Leaving Yahoo | Search Engine Optimization & Internet Marketing (SEO & SEM) Blog Says:

    [...] his personal blog, Cutting says he’ll be doing much the same work with Cloudera that he was doing at Yahoo, and will continue [...]

  16. Open Source mobile edition Says:

    [...] his Hadoop project. (Picture from Facebook.) The timing was coincidental, he insisted. In a blog post he heaped fulsome praise on Yahoo and said that at Cloudera he will be "well-positioned to help it [...]

  17. Sameer Says:

    Good Luck!!!!

  18. Friends on the Move: Hadoop, AOL & PayPal Says:

    [...] Cutting, creator of open-source software framework Hadoop,has left Yahoo to join Cloudera, a Burlingame, Calif.-based startup that is commercializing Hadoop. The center of [...]

  19. Daniel Tunkelang Says:

    Just adding my congrats to the pile!

  20. Greg Linden Says:

    Congrats, Doug!

  21. Edward J. Yoon Says:

    Congrats, Good luck.

  22. Cutting out for Cloudera just in time | WebFroster Says:

    [...] timing was coincidental, he insisted. In a blog post he heaped fulsome praise on Yahoo and said that at Cloudera he will be “well-positioned to [...]

  23. Avi Rappoport Says:

    Good luck with Cloudera, glad to know you’ll still be involved in Hadoop.

  24. MischMasch 2009-08-11 – portenkirchner.net Says:

    [...] Doug Cutting is leaving Yahoo! and will be joining Cloudera. (Via Free Search) [...]

  25. Where can I find a Ice Blue Nintendo DS Lite? | Nintendo Store Says:

    [...] Joining Cloudera « Free Search [...]

  26. Mininoticias de la semana (10/08 – 16/08) Says:

    [...] – Doug Cutting deja Yahoo! para irse a Cloudera y seguir desarrollando [...]

  27. Shared Items - August 12, 2009 « Jeetu’s Shared Memory Says:

    [...] Joining Cloudera [...]

  28. Emorragia continua « MarcoOnaCloud Says:

    [...] dimenticavo: ha lasciato [...]

  29. Doug Cutting Leaving Yahoo! To Join Cloudera | MULTIMAP Says:

    [...] search and infrastructure expert Doug Cutting is leaving the company to join Cloudera. He will be leaving Yahoo! at the end of August, 2009. Cutting created [...]

  30. Doug Cutting joins Cloudera « すでにそこにある雲 Says:

    [...] Joining Cloudera [...]

  31. Doug Cutting Leaving Yahoo! To Join Cloudera | Traffficum.com - Traffic for your website Says:

    [...] search and infrastructure expert Doug Cutting is leaving the company to join Cloudera. He will be leaving Yahoo! at the end of August, 2009. Cutting created [...]

  32. mrdhana Says:

    hearty congratulations….

  33. Antonio Gulli Says:

    Doug, congratulation. Nutch was great since the very beginning and what you made after that was awesome. I cannot wait to see the rest.

  34. sithuhliang Says:

    hey Doug, you r a great guy. Now i use your frame work and learn it and make it for myanmar search engine

  35. Sulabh Says:

    Congratulations Doug, I was totally unaware of Lucene few days back untill I found this great article, simple though usefull, http://www.ezdia.com/Lucene_in_five_minutes/Content.do?id=674

  36. SEOConsulting Says:

    When I started to read this post, my first thought was that you were moving away from your creation.

    Thank you for clarifying that your move will allow you to help your “child” not only to walk, but to run.

  37. Jennifer Malapitan Says:

    Hi, Doug

    I am a research analyst based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. I am currently researching about open source search engine in Arabic. Would greatly appreciate if you are able to provide me with your contact details through the e-mail address provided, since I am unable to get through Cloudera’s telephone number.

    Thanks and kindest regards.

  38. Hadoop and Cloudera: Open Source for the Cloud Says:

    [...] recent additions to the Cloudera team is Doug Cutting, a search engine specialist from Yahoo and one of the founders of the Hadoop project. This is a big loss for Yahoo and a huge gain for [...]

  39. parfume Says:

    Congratulations Doug – Good Luck

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  43. darkdruid99 Says:

    Congratulation and GOOD LUCK DUDE!!!

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    Прикольная статья. Кое-что новое узнал для себя. Автору респект и уважуха :)

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