Pivotal and Hortonworks will collaborate to accelerate development of Apache Ambari, the open source framework for provisioning, managing and monitoring Hadoop clusters. Pivotal will dedicate engineers toward advancing the “installation, configuration and management capabilities” of Apache Ambari as part of the larger project of contributing to software that promotes adoption of Apache Hadoop. In a blog post, Pivotal’s Jamie Buckley elaborated on the value of Apache Ambari to the Hadoop ecosystem as follows:
Apache Hadoop projects are central to our efforts to drive the most value for the enterprise. An open source, extensible and vendor neutral application to manage services in a standardized way benefits the entire ecosystem. It increases customer agility and reduces operational costs and can ultimately help drive Hadoop adoption.
Here, Buckley remarks on the way in which Ambari enhances the process of deploying and managing Hadoop by reducing costs and increasing the flexibility of customer choices regarding the operationalization of Hadoop. Meanwhile, Shaun Connolly, VP Strategy at Hortonworks, commented on the significance of Pivotal’s contribution to the Apache Ambari project as follows:
Pivotal has a strong record of contribution to open source and has proven their commitment with projects such as Cloud Foundry, Spring, Redis and more. Collaborating with Hortonworks and others in the Apache Hadoop ecosystem to further invest in Apache Ambari as the standard management tool for Hadoop will be quite powerful. Pivotal’s track record in open source overall and the breadth of skills they bring will go a long way towards helping enterprises be successful, faster, with Hadoop.
Connolly highlights Pivotal’s historical commitment to open source projects such as Cloud Foundry and its track record of success helping enterprises effectively utilize Apache Hadoop. Hortonworks stands to gain from Pivotal’s extraordinary engineering talent and reputation for swiftly releasing production-grade code for Big Data management and analytics applications. Meanwhile, Pivotal benefits from enriching an open source project that both vendors refer to in the context of a “standard” management tool for the Apache Hadoop ecosystem. The real winner, however, is Hortonworks, who now can claims the backing of Pivotal for the open source project Ambari incubated by some of its engineers, but also reaps the benefits of dedicated engineering staff from Pivotal that will almost certainly accelerate the rate of development of Ambari. The only qualification, here, is that Pivotal’s collaboration with Hortonworks is likely to ensure the optimization of Ambari for both the Pivotal HD and Hortonworks distribution, with the ancillary consequence that Ambari may be less suited for other Hadoop distributions such as Cloudera and MapR. Regardless, the collaboration between Hortonworks and Pivotal promises to serve as a huge coup for the Big Data industry at large both with respect to expediting development of Apache Ambari, and constituting a model for collaboration between competitors in the Big Data space that will ultimately enhance Hadoop adoption and effective utilization.
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