Building on the ideas that powered Google’s early scalability ( read How google handled BIG data ), Doug Cutting and Mike Cafarella brought those concepts to the open-source world with the creation of the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). Their work democratized large-scale data processing, making it possible for anyone — not just tech giants — to store and analyze massive datasets across clusters of ordinary machines. HDFS became the backbone of the big data revolution, inspiring an entire ecosystem of distributed computing systems.