Hortonworks to Cloudera edit 
Right - I think we’re done with our trip through the Hortonworks technology stack, however there are two updates today before we move on. Apologies in advance if this screws up either the RSS feeds or e-mail newsletters - I’m not entirely sure how these will handle updates to the site, but there’s only one way to find out.
Firstly, I’ve re-worked the Hortonworks page to better describe their product offerings. The one thing I really like about Hortonworks is it’s openness. Normally when looking at commercial vendors there’s a whole pile of exaggeration and misdirection about what their product is and what it can do and how it’s so much better than any other option on the market, however because Hortonworks deal entirely in open source technologies they feel like a more open and transparent company, and actually understanding what they offer therefore feels a little more straightforward. There are some big commercial vendors coming up on my list however where I don’t have a huge amount of experience with their products, and I’m therefore holding out no hope of being able to understand the detail of what they offer, given the lack of any publicly available documentation and product websites that are little more than content-less flashy brochures. When I get to these, I’m definitely going to need some help.
Secondly, I’ve added a page for HDP for Windows, which is now also included in our list of Hadoop Distributions. Hadoop itself, and a bunch of the other related Apache technologies support being built on Windows as a native Windows executable, however HDP is (as far as I’m aware) the only Hadoop distribution that supports Windows (presumably as part of Hortonworks’ deal with Microsoft for Azure HDInsight). It’s not the full HDP distribution however - missing some key technologies including Ambari, Solr and Spark.
Up tomorrow then - our first look into the Cloudera technology stack. We’ll start with their distributions (CDH, Cloudera Express and Cloudera Enterprise), add these to our list of Hadoop distributions, have a look at the new Apache technologies that these include that we haven’t looked at yet, and then finish up with adding Cloudera to our list of technology vendors. At least that’s the plan - managing to stick to it will probably be a first for this site.