Very good points. I liked learning how to use hadoop academically, but it's not an end all be all tool. If you want to do map reduce, it's perfectly reasonable

Very good points. I liked learning how to use hadoop academically, but it's not an end all be all tool. If you want to do map reduce, it's perfectly reasonable just to use something smaller scale on multiple cores to do some kind of data processing. Another thing is real time processing, using something like storm (http://storm-project.net/ http://storm-project.net/) or even the parallelism based systems like Akka on the JVM or Go will allow you to have adequate performance. Hadoop has a lot of overhead in not only operations but also job startup.