At BackType, we are heavy users of Hadoop. We use it to run computations on our 30TB datastore of social data. We've even open-sourced some significant projects that are built on top of Hadoop.

Unfortunately, Hadoop has problems. It's sloppily implemented and requires all sorts of arcane knowledge to operate it. We would be the first to try out a replacement for Hadoop if a viable alternative existed. In this post, we'll look at some of the darker aspects of Hadoop.