Hadoop Streaming

Hadoop provides an API to MapReduce that allows you to write your map and reduce functions in languages other than Java. Hadoop Streaming uses Unix standard streams as the interface between Hadoop and your program, so you can use any language that can read standard input and write to standard output to write your MapReduce program.[22]

Streaming is naturally suited for text processing. Map input data is passed over standard input to your map function, which processes it line by line and writes lines to standard output. A map output key-value pair is written as a single tab-delimited line. Input to the reduce function is in the same format — a tab-separated key-value pair — passed over standard input. The reduce function reads lines from standard input, which the framework guarantees are sorted by key, and writes its results to standard output.

Let’s illustrate this by rewriting our MapReduce program for finding maximum temperatures by year in Streaming.