The next hurdle for HBase: from useful to usable

Track: 
store
Speaker(s): 
Jonathan Gray

Apache HBase has proven to be an extremely flexible, scalable, and performant storage engine for a wide variety of use cases across a large number of diverse organizations. Those that have committed themselves to understanding (and taming) HBase have had tremendous success. But the path has not always been an easy one for early adopters, and even in the most successful environments HBase is still operationally cumbersome and new developers still require significant training. The challenge for the HBase community today is how to make this powerful piece of infrastructure software more accessible, taking it from being useful to some to being usable by all.

This talk will describe many of these existing difficulties with HBase and provide recommendations for how these might be addressed in the future. Technical specifics around deployment, configuration, and management as well as general development, application design, extending existing functionality, and testing will give attendees a solid overview of where pain points exist and an idea of potential paths forward.

About the speaker: 
Jonathan Gray is an entrepreneur and software engineer with a background in startups, open source, and all things data. Prior to founding Continuuity, Jonathan was a software engineer at Facebook where he helped drive HBase engineering efforts including Facebook Messages and several other large-scale projects. As an open source evangelist, he was responsible for helping build the Facebook engineering brand through open source and developer outreach. Before joining Facebook, Jonathan was the founder of Streamy.com, a consumer Internet startup founded in 2006 focused on realtime sharing and discovery of content. Streamy’s data problems led Jonathan to become an early adopter of Hadoop and HBase and a core contributor and active committer in the community. Jonathan holds a degree in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.