Making sense of the Hadoop ecosystem

I've been learning Hadoop for my job at Rackspace, so I wrote up a rather lengthy treatise as a primer on the various pieces of software in the Hadoop ecosystem.  After asking for some fact-checking from my team, it was suggested that I post it to the Rackspace blog instead, so I did.  They said it was too much awesome for a single post, so they had me split it into two posts, kind of like Kill Bill or the last Twilight movie.  Writing these posts is what got me to finally start this blog, so now you know where to point the blame.

Part 1

Part 2

Things have changed a little in the last month since I wrote the posts.  Maybe I'll do a Part 3 at some point with what I've learned since then.

Edit: Fixed the link to Part 1 - it had changed since they originally published it for some reason.