Cloudera versus Hortonworks
A few weeks ago I wrote:
The other big part of Hortonworks’ story is the claim that it holds the axe in Apache Hadoop development.
and
… just how dominant Hortonworks really is in core Hadoop development is a bit unclear. Meanwhile, Cloudera people seem to be leading a number of Hadoop companion or sub-projects, including the first two I can think of that relate to Hadoop integration or connectivity, namely Sqoop and Flume. So I’m not persuaded that the “we know this stuff better” part of the Hortonworks partnering story really holds up.
Now Mike Olson — CEO of my client Cloudera — has posted his analysis of the matter, in response to an earlier Hortonworks post asserting its claims. In essence, Mike argues:
- It’s ridiculous to say any one company, e.g. Hortonworks, has a controlling position in Hadoop development.
- Such diversity is a Very Good Thing.
- Cloudera folks now contribute and always have contributed to Hadoop at a higher rate than Hortonworks folks.
- If you consider just core Hadoop projects — the most favorable way of counting from a Hadoop standpoint — Hortonworks has a lead, but not all that big of one.
I think Hortonworks likes to make the argument “But our contributions, on average, are more important than Cloudera’s contributions.” That claim perhaps aside, Cloudera’s argument looks persuasive.
Anyhow, the main bases for deciding whose enterprise support for Hadoop to buy — Cloudera’s or Hortonworks’ — are probably:
- Who is even offering it? 🙂 Hortonworks, last I checked, wasn’t yet — Yahoo perhaps excepted — although it’s a near-term roadmap item for them to start doing so.
- Whose is better? Even when Hortonworks does offer enterprise support, it will lack experience at the support process. (To some extent, that could be worked around by providing money-losingly inefficient support at first.)
- Who bundles more useful proprietary software with their support? Unless you think the code in Cloudera Enterprise is 100% worthless, Cloudera wins that one.
- Price. I have no idea how that one will shake out.
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6 Responses to “Cloudera versus Hortonworks”
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it is really disheartening to see this pissing war between two really important players in the Hadoop space. Hadoop is in its very nascent stage and there is a great risk of it being hijacked by Oracle and have them marginalize the technology to protect their DBMS franchise http://freedb2.com/2011/10/04/oracle-nosql-hadoop-and-the-cloud-something-borrowed-something-new/.
Cloudera, HortonWorks, IBM etc. should be working together to popularize Hadoop as a Big Data solution or risk having Oracle turn it in to an ETL tool for Oracle databases.
Hi Curt,
We’re responded to mike’s post here:
http://www.hortonworks.com/reality-check-contributions-to-apache-hadoop/
I think it is a pretty open and shut case. Happy to talk with you about it.
E14
Hi Eric,
I don’t think it much matters who deserves brownie points for funding an open source project in the past or present. Rather, I’m concerned about which products/technologies one should adopt and which organization(s) one should do business with to meet one’s objectives.
Thus, I see Hortonworks’ claims of having made a large share of the Apache Hadoop contributions as being most interesting when building credibility for some other business argument. The example of that most on my mind is “Give us money for support, because we’re the guys who REALLY know this stuff.” A partnership/porting deal — e.g. to a specific hardware stack — would be a different (or perhaps overlapping) case in which such evidence was relevant.
I think Cloudera’s way of allocating contributions is more relevant to most of those discussions than yours is. I think you’re on more solid ground when you raise the point that not all contributions are equal in weight.
Actually, Datameer contributed the most code (tongue in cheek) to Hadoop. Read the story here http://bit.ly/qXcQJh
[…] more to the open source but is this such an important criteria? If we were to judge by the sparing between Cloudera and Hortonworks we would conclude that it is. I personally think that what really matters is bringing legitimacy […]
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