Hadoop Summit 2014 is just around the corner. But before we get a chance to see what has been happening in the world of Hadoop, let’s take a look back at some of the developers development at last year’s conference.

Announcements came from tools across the industry including Hortonworks support of YARN, MapR and Fusion-io performance upgrades, Continuuity tools for developers, along with Hadapt, Kognitio, and Hunk.

One overarching theme of last year summit was that Hadoop is crossing the chasm, becoming the key component of the next generation data architecture. Hortonworks unveiled the community preview of the next release of its Hortonworks Data Platform that supports Yarn. Hadoop 2.0 is going to be driven around the YARN architecture, and YARN is going to enable a bunch of other workloads, opening the platform for a broadening of how it’s used in the enterprise.

With the advent of Yarn, it has become even more important for developers to make sure that all dependencies and changes–across code, data and configuration–have been recorded and included in the change before promoting it. By managing the resource requests across a cluster, YARN turns Hadoop from a single application system to a multi-application operating system, which made is easier for developer to run multiple applications against relevant data sets.

MapR and Fusion-io showcased significant performance gains by combining the Hadoop-based MapR M7 big data platform with the Fusion ioMemory system when running read-intensive HBase applications.

Continuuity announced the latest version of its Developer Suite 1.7. This version integrates MapReduce into the platform and allows developers to run real-time and batch workloads on a single cluster over shared datasets. By providing Java developers with the ability to easily build and run batch and real-time workloads on a single Hadoop cluster with a unified API, the new tool suite opens up possibilities for building a new class of applications. Instead of being limited to traditional batch workloads, developers can add real-time streaming capabilities to have the most current data reflected in their apps.

Hadapt, one of the contributors of Hadoop, introduced a real relational engine with indexing and all the benefits of SQL, along with search capabilities to bring lot of the SQL capabilities to Hadoop such as user defined queries, the platform enables users to write their own analytics functions, making the data accessible directly to business analysts.

Kognitio debuted a new release of the Kognitio Analytic Platform with greater connectivity across programming languages and improved performance. Version 8 of the software offers NoSQL processing for developers combined with massively parallel processing execution of any script or binary code such as R, Python or Java.

Splunk, best known for its real-time operational intelligence software, unveiled a beta version of its new Hunk–Splunk Analytics for Hadoop. Hunk integrates tools for exploration, analysis and visualization of data stored in Hadoop. It uses the company’s virtual index technology for data analysis and provides tools for building charts, graphs, custom dashboards and reports.