Hadoop Sandboxes and Trials Spread Out

We all know that there is a skills gap when it comes to Hadoop in the Big Data market. In fact, Gartner Inc.'s 2015 Hadoop Adoption Study, involving 284 Gartner Research Circle members, found that only 125 respondents who completed the whole survey had already invested in Hadoop or had plans to do so within the next two years. The study found that there are difficulties in implementing Hadoop, including hardship in finding skilled Hadoop professionals.

However, there are some options appearing for testing Hadoop in safe “sandbox” environments that could help many administrators unravel potential issues before deploying Hadoop. Here are some good choices.

On this page, you can get acces to Hortonworks’ “Sandbox” where you can try out the latest features in the company’s Hadoop distribution, HDP. Within the sandbox, you can test and evaluate features without committing to them.
While Cloudera has long provided a complete, self-contained, pre-configured virtual machine for running Hadoop, many users simply want to quickly experience Hadoop and its related projects but don’t want to bother with a large download or the system overhead of running a virtual machine on their systems.

That’s the logic behind the release of Cloudera Live (beta), a new way to get started with Apache Hadoop online, in seconds. There are no downloads, no installations, and no waiting.

According to Cloudera:

“In our first release you can instantly explore and try demos across the full breadth of CDH 5, Cloudera’s completely open source Hadoop platform. You will have up to 3 hours at a time to interact with our sample data sets using Hue, the Hadoop User Interface developed by Cloudera and now supported by every major Hadoop distribution in some form. With Cloudera Live, you get to use the very latest version of Hue which includes support for Cloudera Impala, Apache Spark, Apache Zookeeper, Apache HBase, Apache Sqoop, and Cloudera Search (powered by Apache Solr), along with nice additions like a new editor for Apache Pig. We’ve provided short tutorials to help you quickly get started creating tables, writing real-time SQL queries, or simply searching and navigating through data.”

Finally, Talend offers its Big Data Sandbox, which provides a visual design environment that is targeted to make it easy to build integration workflows, with pre-built, big data use cases and a tutorial guide. The idea is to give users of any ability the chance to run and evaluate Hadoop.

Hadoop remains complex, but you can try it before you commit. It’s worth some thought.