The Phone Call That Changed the Face of Big Data | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

Excerpt from an overview of how YARN (a.k.a. Apache Hadoop NextGen MapReduce) was created

"Today, Hadoop underpins Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Yahoo, and countless other companies. But in 2007, when Murthy took that early-morning call, it was still obscure. A year earlier, Doug Cutting and Michael Cafarella had created the platform, on their own time, inspired by white papers published by Google in 2004, and eventually Yahoo got behind the project, putting Cutting on the payroll. The company’s search architect, Eric Baldeschwieler, had asked Murthy to work on Hadoop because he had experience with both systems software — such as operating systems and other low-level software components — and open source.
“My journey with Hadoop almost didn’t happen,” Murthy remembers. “I looked at it and said: ‘Who the hell writes systems software in Java?’”"

The Phone Call That Changed the Face of Big Data | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com