This document discusses Kudu, an open source storage system for Hadoop that provides fast analytics on fast data. It was built by Cloudera to address gaps in Hadoop's storage technologies by providing low-latency transactions and fast scans. The document outlines Kudu's design goals, architecture using columnar storage and Raft consensus, performance benchmarks showing faster analytics than Parquet and HBase, and two use cases at Chinese company Xiaomi where Kudu improved their analytics pipelines.