Doug Cutting created Apache Hadoop in 2005 after naming it after his son's stuffed elephant "Hadoop". Hadoop is an open-source software framework for distributed storage and processing of large datasets across clusters of computers. It consists of modules for distributed file system (HDFS), resource management (YARN), and distributed processing (MapReduce). HDFS stores large files across nodes and provides high throughput even if nodes fail, while MapReduce allows parallel processing of large datasets using a map and reduce model.