Hortonworks is taking a significant step forward into the cloud with its Hadoop distribution, announcing the availability of a new managed service on Amazon Web Services dubbed Hortonworks Data Cloud. Here are the key details from its announcement:
Hortonworks Data Cloud for AWS is specifically optimized to run well on AWS for enterprise ephemeral workloads and is designed to integrate with AWS services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon RDS and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The new cloud service offers the following benefits for customers:
• The ease-of-use of a cloud data platform as a service with a pay-as-you-go billing model.
• The fastest onramp to running the most common Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark and Apache Hive workloads in the cloud.
• A highly-prescriptive experience configured and pre-tuned for the most popular use cases (data science and exploration, data preparation and ETL, data analytics and reporting) enabling data scientists, developers and end users to be more productive.
• More time to focus on processing and deriving value from data and less time configuring and operating data platform infrastructure.
Hortonworks' Hadoop distribution is also under the hood of Microsoft Azure's HDInsight service. At first blush, HDInsight appears to have a broader feature set than Hortonworks Data Cloud does at launch, but that could change over time. In any case, the years Hortonworks has spent working on HDInsight has surely given it a blueprint for success on AWS. The move also provides customers with choice among multiple clouds for Hortonworks' flavor of Hadoop.
Hortonworks and its competitor Cloudera have recently said the lion's share of their growth is coming from workloads run on public cloud infrastructure, notes Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen. But the growth for Hadoop in the cloud has been even faster for managed services such as HDInisght and Amazon's own Elastic MapReduce since they don't burden customers with ongoing deployment and management issues, Henschen adds.
The move to AWS was a smart one for Hortonworks given the provider's "top dog" status among public clouds, Henschen adds. It also puts Hortonworks ahead of the game compared to Cloudera which has yet to launch its own managed cloud service, he says.
Rather, Cloudera has delivered a tool called Cloudera Director, which makes the process of deploying Hadoop on cloud environments and VMWare. (Read more about it here.) That said, you can expect Cloudera to come up with an answer to Hortonworks Data Cloud in short order, Henschen says.
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