Pretend that you’re working on an open source project for searching the web by crawling websites and indexing them. You have an implementation that works on a small cluster of machines but requires a lot of manual steps. Pretend too that you’re working on this project around the same time Google publishes papers about its data storage and processing frameworks. Clearly, you would jump on these publications and spearhead an open source implementation based on them. Okay, maybe you wouldn’t, and we surely didn’t; but Doug Cutting and Mike Cafarella did.
假设你正在做一个开源的项目，通过抓取和索引网站来搜索网页。你的应用系统跑在一个几台机器组成的小群集上，需要大量的手工步骤来配置实现。又假设，你在做这个项目同时谷歌发布了它的数据存储和数据处理的框架。很明显，你会马上查找这些资料并在他们开源框架的基础上来实现自己的开源应用。也许你不会这么做，我们肯定也会这么做，但道格卡丁和迈克Cafarella却是这么做的。
Built out of Apache Lucene, Nutch was their open source web-search project and the motivation for the first implementation of Hadoop. From there, Hadoop began to receive lots of attention from Yahoo!, which hired Cutting and others to work on it full time. From there, Hadoop was extracted out of Nutch and eventually became an Apache top-level project. With Hadoop well underway and the Bigtable paper published, the groundwork existed to implement an open source Bigtable on top of Hadoop. In 2007, Cafarella released code for an experimental, open source Bigtable.He called it HBase. The startup Powerset decided to dedicate Jim Kellerman and Michael Stack to work on this Bigtable analog as a way of contributing back to the open source community on which it relied.
Nutch爬虫系统，内置了Apache的Lucene，是Apache的开源Web搜索项目，也是Hadoop最先实施应用的动机。在这个项目实施过程中，Hadoop开始受到雅虎大量的关注，雅虎聘请了卡丁和其他人开始全职推进Hadoop的开发工作。在雅虎，Hadoop从Nutch的提取了出来，并最终成为Apache下的一个*项目。Hadoop研发的进行和Bigtable论文的发表，奠定了在Hadoop之上实现一个开源的Bigtable的基础。 2007年，Cafarella发布了一个实验性开源的Bigtable的代码. 他把它称为HBase。这促使了吉姆·凯勒曼和迈克尔斯塔克决定在此Bigtable的基础上持续推进该项目，作为回报开源社区的一种方式。
HBase proved to be a powerful tool, especially in places where Hadoop was already in use. Even in its infancy, it quickly found production deployment and developer support from other companies. Today, HBase is a top-level Apache project with thriving developer and user communities. It has become a core infrastructure component and is being run in production at scale worldwide in companies like StumbleUpon, Trend Micro, Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce, and Adobe
HBase证明了自身是一个强大的工具，尤其是在那些Hadoop已经在使用的场合。即使它才处于起步阶段，但很快就被其他公司用于生产部署和获得了其他公司里开发者的支持。今天，HBase作为*的Apache项目，它的开发者和用户社区处于欣欣向荣的状态。它已成为一个核心基础设施组件， 在全球各个公司里的生产系统里运行着，如，StumbleUpon公司，趋势科技，Facebook，Twitter，Salesforce和Adobe公司。
HBase isn’t a cure-all of data management problems, and you might include another technology in your stack at a later point for a different use case. Let’s look at how HBase is being used today and the types of applications people have built using it. Through this discussion, you’ll gain a feel for the kinds of data problems HBase can solve and has been used to tackle.
HBase并不是包治百病的，它并不能解决所有的数据管理问题，你可能需要针对不同的技术场景使用不同的技术框架。让我们来看看现在人们是如何应用HBase的和人们用它来构建了什么类型的应用系统。通过接下来的讨论，你将会获得HBase可以解决什么问题及如何解决问题方面的经验。