Hortonworks, the leading contributor to and provider of enterprise Apache Hadoop, today announced a series of cloud deployment, operations, security, data governance and user experience advancements aimed at making Apache Hadoop ubiquitous across mainstream enterprises. These advancements reinforce Hortonworks’ dedication to provide enterprises with a complete enterprise Hadoop platform entirely in open source.

“The first decade of Hadoop’s existence was focused on solidifying the core to become the foundation of a centralized data architecture. It’s clear that Hadoop has won that battle and is transforming every industry. Now the focus shifts towards accelerating the utilization of Hadoop to become ubiquitous across enterprises,” said Rob Bearden, chief executive officer of Hortonworks. “That means making Hadoop easier to consume for multiple audiences while addressing operational, security and governance needs using the same open approach that our partners and customers expect.”

Among the advancements being highlighted at Hadoop Summit Europe on April 15 and 16 are the following:

Consistent Operations

  • Automated cloud provisioning and elastic scaling ─ Hortonworks has signed a definitive agreement to acquire SequenceIQ, an open source provider of rapid deployment tools for launching Hadoop clusters into any major cloud platform, including Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and OpenStack, and auto-scaling clusters based on metrics provided by Apache Ambari.
  • Automated rolling upgrades ─ Administrators can reduce downtime by applying updates in an automated fashion across their Hadoop clusters using Apache Ambari 2.0 as well as standard scripting tools already in use by the enterprise.
  • Centralized management of health alerts and metrics ─ Ambari 2.0 provides a built-in metrics and alerting system which pre-configures an optimized set of health alerts based on the services installed in a cluster.

Comprehensive Security

  • Simplified setup of authentication ─ Kerberos, an industry standard authentication technology, can now be configured in just a few simple clicks. Administrators are now able to easily deploy secure Hadoop clusters.
  • Automated setup of security administration, authorization and audit ─ The installation and configuration of Apache Ranger, the security management tool for Hadoop, is now fully automated. This gives administrators a simple way to centrally manage security policies.

Trusted Governance

  • New members of the Data Governance Initiative (DGI) ─ Engineers from JPMorgan Chase and Schlumberger have joined Hortonworks, Aetna, Merck, Target, and SAS engineers to drive enterprise requirements for comprehensive data governance within the Apache open source community.
  • New Apache project proposal for data governance ─ Proposed as Apache Atlas, this project aims to provide data classification, centralized auditing, search and lineage capabilities paired with a security and policy engine; all key requirements outlined when the DGI was unveiled in January 2015.

Enriched Developer Experience

  • Production-ready experience for Spark application developers ─ Apache Spark 1.2.1 is now included with HDP v2.2, providing application developers a production-ready platform for deploying Spark applications on-premises or in the cloud.
  • Visual query performance analysis tools ─ Ambari 2.0 introduces new user views for visually analyzing and tuning the performance of Hive and Tez applications.

Visit the Hortonworks blog for more information on these advancements and to learn more about how Hortonworks is helping to make Hadoop more ubiquitous throughout the enterprise.

Supporting Quotes
“We are seeing broad adoption of Hadoop to solve business problems and as it becomes more universal there are increased requirements for security, operations and data governance capabilities,” said Randy Guard, SAS Vice President of Product Management. “It’s exciting to see these enterprise capabilities come to market through open source, community driven efforts. We are eager to continue working with Hortonworks to extend enterprise capabilities to our customers.”

Availability
The Hortonworks Data Platform 2.2 with Apache Ambari 2.0 and the latest Hortonworks Sandbox are available now for download from the Hortonworks website at http://hortonworks.com/hdp/downloads/.