![Brian Kinnebrew, a Senior Solutions Architect at SAS](https://blogs.sas.com/content/sascom/files/2016/03/Strata-Photo-Kinnebrew-600x571.jpg)
As the big data era continues to evolve, Hadoop remains the workhorse for distributed computing environments. MapReduce has been the dominant workload in Hadoop, but Spark -- due to its superior in-memory performance -- is seeing rapid acceptance and growing adoption. As the Hadoop ecosystem matures, users need the flexibility to use either traditional MapReduce