See also the wonderful COST paper: https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotos15/workshop-program/presentation/mcsherry https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotos15/wo

See also the wonderful COST paper: https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotos15/workshop-program/presentation/mcsherry https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotos15/workshop-program/p... But the article is kind of wrong. It depends on your data size and problem - you can even use commandline-tools with Hadoop Map/Reduce and the Streaming API and Hadoop is still useful if you have a few terabytes of data that you can tackle with map and reduce algorithms and in that case multiple machines do help quite a lot. anything that fits on your local ssd/hdd probably does not need hadoop... however you can run the same unix commands from the article just fine on a 20tb dataset with Hadoop. Hadoop MapReduce/HDFS is a tool for a specific purpose not magic fairy dust. Google did build it for indexing and storing the web and probably not to calculate some big excel sheets...