Sandwich Memes

Finally, a MapReduce explanation that makes sense to my stomach. Raw ingredients get mapped to their processed forms, then reduced into delicious sandwiches. If only Hadoop documentation came with lunch included. This is exactly how I explain distributed computing to new hires - "It's just like making sandwiches in parallel. You don't have one person doing everything from slicing tomatoes to final assembly." Ten years of big data experience and I still think about this diagram during architecture meetings. Sad but true.