In Defense of MapReduce

Don't throw the MapReduce baby out with the bath water! MapReduce represents a specific instance of a general class of data-parallel dataflow languages, in which computations are conceptualized as directed graphs, where vertices represent operations on records that flow along the directed edges. From this perspective, MAP and REDUCE are the two operators that MapReduce provides, which define particular configurations of the edges that flow into and out of vertices and specify the computations that occur at the vertices themselves.