At StampedeCon 2012 in St. Louis, Scott Fines of NISC presents: Recent years have seen a sudden and rapid introduction of new technologies for distributing applications to essentially arbitrary levels. The growth in variety and depth of these different systems has grown to match, and it can be a challenge just to keep up. In this talk, I’ll discuss some of the more common systems such as Hadoop, HBase, and Cassandra, and some of the different scenarios and pitfalls of using them. I’ll cover when MapReduce is powerful and helpful, and when it’s better to use a different approach. Putting it all together, I’ll mention ZooKeeper, Flume, and some of the surrounding small projects that can help make a useable system.