In “Information Platforms and the Rise of the Data Scientist,”^[98] Jeff Hammerbacher describes Information Platforms as “the locus of their organization’s efforts to ingest, process, and generate information,” and how they “serve to accelerate the process of learning from empirical data.”

One of the biggest ingredients in the Information Platform built by Jeff’s team at Facebook was Hive, a framework for data warehousing on top of Hadoop. Hive grew from a need to manage and learn from the huge volumes of data that Facebook was producing every day from its burgeoning social network. After trying a few different systems, the team chose Hadoop for storage and processing, since it was cost-effective and met their scalability needs.^[99]