Everywhere you look today, enterprises are embracing big data-driven customer relationships and building innovative solutions based on insights gained from data. According to IBM, every day we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years. This data comes from everywhere: sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction records, and cell phone GPS signals, just to name a few. This data is big data.

The demand for storing this unprecedented amount of information is enough of a challenge, but when you add the need for analytics, the technology requirements truly start pushing the envelope on state-of-the-art IT infrastructures. Fortunately, the Open Source community has stepped up to this challenge and developed a storage and processing layer called Apache Hadoop. Add the dozens of other projects integrating with Apache Hadoop and you have the whole Hadoop ecosystem.

The Hadoop ecosystem, along with the data management architectures it enables, is growing at an unprecedented rate, with 73% of Hadoop cluster deployments now in production — a number which continues to rise.

The demand for individuals who have experience managing this platform is also accelerating. According to the IT Skills and Certifications Pay Index research from Foote Partners, “the need for big data skills also continues to lead to pay increases — about 8% over the last year.” Now is exactly the right time to build an exciting and rewarding career managing big data with Apache Hadoop.

This introductory course is taught by Hadoop experts from The Linux Foundation’s ODPi collaborative project. As host to some of the world’s leading open source projects, The Linux Foundation provides training and networking opportunities to help you advance your career.

This course is perfect for IT professionals seeking a high-level overview of Hadoop, and who want to find out if a Hadoop-driven big data strategy is the right solution to meet their data retention and analytics needs. This course will also help anyone who wants to set up a small-scale Hadoop test environment to gain experience working with this exciting open source technology.