Hadoop’s History

Hadoop was created by Doug Cutting and Michael J. Cafarella. Doug, who was working at Yahoo at the time,named it after his son's toy elephant.It was originally developed to support distribution for the Nutch search engine project.

Hadoop is based on work done by Google in the late 1990s/early 2000s
– Specifically, on papers describing the Google File System (GFS) published in 2003, and MapReduce published in 2004.