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by wstrange 3735 days ago
Cloudera and Hortonworks have raised a ton of VC money, but it is not clear (yet) that they have viable, profitable business models.
1 comments

I hope that at least Cloudera will profit and thrive. Having used plain Apache components, then Hortonworks, then Cloudera... They are far and away the superior distribution, regardless of whether or not you are an "enterprise" customer.

My $employer paid Hortonworks for a support contract and I have no qualms declaring publicly that it was a total and utter scam. (We are a Java shop and know our shit)

If I go into too much detail I'll write countless pages like my internal report on why we needed to switch, but the bottom line is that Cloudera's products are well and honestly documented, while, as of last year, Hortonworks' products are simply one land-mine after another.

Their management platform (Cloudera manager) being closed-source is barely a mark on the comparison analysis when you compare it to Ambari in practice. Ambari is a bad joke and I'd rather do without it after spending significant time using it and trying to extend it.

And I could go into excruciating detail as to how Hortonworks abuses the Apache License to try and force lock-in. It's disgusting and pathetic.

I have no experience with Hortonworks, but Cloudera certainly tries hard, even though it too has plenty of issues, but then the whole "Hadoop Echosystem" is in such fast-moving flux, it's understandable.

Cloudera also makes (Apache Licensed) Impala, which IMHO is a pretty cool product.

Another company worth mentioning is Databricks, which leads Apache Spark development.