As an open source project, Hadoop has been under active development over the past few years. New versions are being released regularly. These new releases either fix bugs contributed by the community, leading to a more stable Hadoop software stack, or add new features for the purpose of more full-fledged and enterprise-level distribution.
In this section, we are going to review the history of releases of Hadoop, pointing out features of these releases. More importantly, we will give tips on choosing a proper Hadoop distribution.
In general, the release version number of a Hadoop distribution consists of three parts: the version number, the major revision number, and the minor revision number.
Note
Sometimes the revision number can have a fourth part, for example, 0.20.203.0, but this is relatively rare.
A Hadoop release name can be described with the following figure: