Why 13 Major Hadoop Projects Are Retiring – Implications for the Big Data Landscape

Unnoticed at first, many Apache projects related to Hadoop are being retired.

Thirteen big‑data‑related Apache projects, including Sentry, Tajo, and Falcon, announced their exit within eleven days.

This gives the impression that the golden era of Hadoop and big data is ending.

Since April 1, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced the retirement of at least 19 open‑source projects, 13 of which are big‑data‑related and 10 belong to the Hadoop ecosystem.

The following thirteen Hadoop‑related projects have been retired:

Apex – a unified platform for streaming and batch processing on Hadoop.

Chukwa – a data collection system for monitoring large distributed systems, built on HDFS.

Crunch – a framework for writing, testing, and running MapReduce pipelines.

Eagle – an analytics solution for real‑time security and performance issue detection on big‑data platforms.

Falcon – a data processing and management solution for data movement, pipeline coordination, lifecycle management, and discovery.

Hama – a big‑data analysis framework running on Hadoop, based on a bulk‑synchronous parallel model.

Lens – provides a unified analytics interface that integrates Hadoop with traditional data warehouses.

Marmotta – an open platform for linked data.

Metron – focuses on real‑time big‑data security.

PredictionIO – a machine‑learning server for managing and deploying production‑ready predictive services.

Sentry – a fine‑grained authorization system for data and metadata in Apache Hadoop.

Tajo – a Hadoop‑based big‑data warehouse system.

Twill – leverages Hadoop YARN’s distributed capabilities with a thread‑like programming model.

Beyond these, many other projects have also been retired, but the simultaneous exit of these thirteen is especially noteworthy.

Apache project activity experiences ups and downs throughout its lifecycle, depending on community participation. Each retirement results from careful deliberation and voting by the Project Management Committee and the Board.

The ASF’s Vice President of Marketing and Communications, Sally Khudairi, noted that this surge is a routine increase in project retirements, and that Hadoop is increasingly being supplanted by Spark, with less redundant duplication between Hortonworks and the legacy Cloudera.

Vendors and customers heavily invested in Apache Sentry now need to consider their losses and plan next steps, reflecting the typical cycle of technology hype, ecosystem growth, and eventual replacement.

What are your thoughts on this wave of Hadoop project retirements? Share your comments below!