These are valid points, and I agree many underestimate the cost of retooling and infrastructure. However, I am working on a team of smart engineers, but shell scripting is new to them, much less learning a full Hadoop / spark setup and associated tools. Luckily, you can often have your cake and eat it too: https://apidocs.joyent.com/manta/example-line-count-by-exten... Super useful system so far, and my goal is to allow our team to learn some basic scripting techniques and then run them on our internal cloud using almost identical tooling. Plus things like simple Python scripts are really easy to teach, and with this infrastructure it can scale quickly!