The Hadoop ecosystem is a collection of open-source tools and frameworks designed for processing and analyzing large datasets. At its core is Hadoop, which provides a distributed storage system called HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) and a processing framework known as MapReduce. These components allow organizations to store vast amounts of data across many servers and process it efficiently. In addition to the core components, the Hadoop ecosystem includes various tools that enhance its capabilities. For example, Apache Hive enables SQL-like querying of data, while Apache Pig offers a scripting language for data manipulation. Other tools like Apache HBase and Apache Spark provide real-time processing and NoSQL database functionalities, making the ecosystem versatile for different data needs.