MapReduce is a programming model used to process large datasets in a distributed computing environment. It works in three stages - map, shuffle, and reduce. In the map stage, data is processed by the mapper and converted into intermediate key-value pairs. These pairs are shuffled and sorted in the shuffle stage. Finally, in the reduce stage, the intermediate data is processed by the reducer to generate the final output. MapReduce provides an easy way to scale applications by distributing processing across large clusters of commodity servers. It allows parallel processing of large datasets in a reliable, fault-tolerant manner.