Randy Pausche once said if there is an elephant in the room you should introduce him so here goes. The latest alpha version (version 2.0.0) of the quickly evolving big-data platform “Hadoop” (the elephant) from Apache is now available.

The move to alpha for version 2.0.0 is a big step up from the previous release version of 1.0.3 and brings the latest big data platform one stop nearer to production ready status. However, there is still a lot more testing and validation required according to Arun Murthy, Release Manager for Apache Hadoop 2.0 release (source: Hortonworks).

Performance enhancements are major component of the new revision together with YARN, the next generation MapReduce, which has seen MapReduce undergo a major overhaul to split the JobTracker into two distinct entities: a global ResourceManager (scheduling and allocating resources) and per application ApplicationMasters (job submission handling).

The Release 2.0.0 alpha is available from the Apache Hadoop Common Releases website.