Apache Spark is another increasingly popular alternative to replace MapReduce with a more performant execution engine but still use Hadoop HDFS as storage engine for large data sets.
Spark Architecture
From architecture perspective Apache Spark is based on two key concepts; Resilient Distributed Datasets (RDD) and directed acyclic graph (DAG) execution engine. With regards to datasets, Spark supports two types of RDDs: parallelized collections that are based on existing Scala collections and Hadoop datasets that are created from the files stored on HDFS. RDDs support two kinds of operations: transformations and actions. Transformations create new datasets from the input (e.g. map or filter operations are transformations), whereas actions return a value after executing calculations on the dataset (e.g. reduce or count operations are actions).