Hadoop Distros: Apache Bigtop edit 
And so to our first (hopefully of many) daily technology summary.
I want to continue our wander through the Apache Hadoop ecosystem by looking at the common Hadoop Distributions, starting with Apache Bigtop, and with this introducing our first technology category - the Hadoop Distribution.
Apache Bigtop is interesting for a couple of reasons - firstly because it’s the only true open source Hadoop distribution (meaning that it includes many components that the commercial distributions don’t, and the components it includes are often more up to date, assuming you’re happy to use the latest snapshot builds), and secondly because of it’s history as Cloudera’s attempt to create a common base Hadoop distribution with all the associated integration testing and packaging (there are links in the Bigtop page that provide further reading on this).
You’ll see that the Bigtop page links to the Hadoop technologies we’re already covered that it packages (and vice-versa), and the aim is that over the coming days we’ll complete this list as we add technology summaries for the rest of the technologies it packages.
And I shouldn’t let our first technology category go uncommented - as we’re going to be looking at the common Hadoop Distributions we’ll start collecting these together under an Hadoop Distribution page and try and round these out over the coming weeks.
That’s it for now - we’ll speak again when we’ve worked our way through the remaining technologies bundled with Apache Bigtop.