Its actually very simple with some clear winners emerging now: Log / Stream Processing - Kafka \n Scalable Storage - HDFS \n Data Processing - Spark, Map reduc

Its actually very simple with some clear winners emerging now: Log / Stream Processing - Kafka \n Scalable Storage - HDFS \n Data Processing - Spark, Map reduce (in that order) \n Historical Analytics - Hive/ Spark SQL \n Real Time Processing - Spark Streaming, Storm \n NoSQL - Cassandra/ HBase \n NoSQL (In memory) - Redis \n Search - Elastic Search \n Some more honorable mentions: kibana on elastic search - for analytics visualization \n druid - for analytics \n Above are the basics - if you add them you will have 90% of the standard stack for big data.