A flexible, complete, secure, easy operational big data platform
March 04, 2019
A flexible, complete, secure, easy operational big data platform
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Hortonworks Data Platform
Hortonworks Data Platform is one of the main solutions we have for Big Data components. We are using a lot of components like HDFS, HBase, Hive, Oozie, Storm, Kafka, Ambari, Zookeeper, Zeppelin, etc that are packaged and provided as part of the Hortonworks Data Platform.
It provides tools for us to manage big data components, store data raw in no SQL database, query, stream data, have projections on data from HDFS and HBase, etc. It also helps us build pipelines to ingest and perform some analytics on data.
- It does a good job of packaging a lot of big data components into bundles and lets you use the ones you are interested in or need. It supports an extensive list of components which lets us solve many problems.
- It provides the ability to manage installations and maintenance using Apache Ambari. It helps us in using management packs to install/upgrade components easily. It also helps us add, remove components, add, remove hosts, perform upgrades in a convenient manner. It also provides alerts and notifications and monitors the environment.
- What they excel in is packaging open source components that are relevant and are useful to solve and complement each other as well as contribute to enhancing those components. They do a great job in the community to keep on top of what would be useful to users, fixing bugs and working with other companies and individuals to make the platform better.
- One thing that could be improved is a browsing, querying, and analytics tool. Currently, Ambari views is the tool they provide to browse for example HDFS, etc. Even though it is improving, it still is not as useful as Hue which provides different kinds of editors, browsers and interfaces a better way like browsing HDFS, browsing HBase tables, accessing Hive and querying, etc.
- There are some works in progress or changes in direction with their different lines of products. They have Hortonworks Data Platform and Hortonworks Data Flow, among others, where storm and Kafka are supported. There was an effort to move storm and Kafka to HDF from HDP, which added some confusion as well as supporting on both later. It gets challenging to keep track of what to use where, and to keep up with version changes and compatibilities.
- Now with Hortonworks and Cloudera coming together, it gets more confusing which of the components are going to be supported, promoted, merged. Both have competing products and some complimentary products. We're hoping to see it will have a good mix that is going to get the best products from both suites into one, but it will be a challenging year or two until that evolves.
- It provides a convenient way of quickly setting up a big data environment, easily setting up clusters with different configurations. It provides several security architectures that can be used as well. Since it provides a big list of components and packaged together, it is a great tool for companies to get set and utilize it for their use cases.
- Since it uses Ambari extensively to install, upgrade and manage software, it is very convenient and easy to support and operationalize the components. Alerting and notifications, ability to create custom alerts give you the capability to add any number of alerts to meet your custom needs. It provides a great way to maintain other software by creating mpacks and the ability to add custom code, and you can add other software to be managed in a centralized tool.
- The use and support of popular and useful open source software and the company's contribution to the community makes HDP a very useful tool that enables a quick, secure, easily maintainable suite of components that can help companies meet the needs of the business. What is great is that new components keep getting added based on any new useful tool that comes available, like Druid, and made available as part of the suite of components. That helps businesses keep up with new capabilities as they become available, and use them to solve their problems.
- Cloudera Manager and MapR
Hortonworks Data Platform is on par with, if not better than, Cloudera or MapR. It provides a big list of components (25-30) that you can pick and use based on your needs. It provides an easy and convenient way to add/remove any of those. It provides a good way of integrating and complimenting components. It provides a very good authentication and authorization using Knox and ranger as well as providing REST API for accessing most components. It has stayed competitive and striving to provide new capabilities as they become available.