Hortonworks Launches New Stack Components, and Updates its Release Cycle

On the heels of its introduction as a hot publlic company back in 2015, Hortonworks, which focuses on the open source Big Data platform Hadoop, has steadily expanded and adjusted the focus of its technology stack. Now it is serving up new adjustments. Hortonworks DataFlow (HDF), Hortonworks' streaming data package, based on Apache NiFi, now includes Apache Storm and Apache Kafka.

If you're unfamiliar with Apache NiFi, it is built around Niagarafiles, which is software that the NSA created to aggregate sensor data on the right systems and generate analytics from the data. Onyara will give Hortonworks an important play as the Internet of Things shapes up.

A Hortonworks blog post notes:

"Previously called “Niagara Files” at the National Security Agency (NSA), the project has been proven at scale in production. NiFi was open sourced as Apache NiFi as part of the NSA Technology Transfer Program in the fall of 2014. Subsequently, it became a top-level Apache project in July 2015."

"Apache NiFi is a secure and reliable data flow solution for IoAT. It delivers high quality real time and trusted data flows and is proven at scale."

 As ZDNet notes:

"Hortonworks is aligning HDP with the Hadoop core and extended delineations defined by the Open Data Platform initiative (ODPi), of which Hortonworks is a founding member. The company will reduce the core components' release cadence to once annually. Core components include YARN, HDFS, MapReduce and Zookeeper. Other components, like Hive, Pig and Spark will release more frequently."

And Tech Target adds:

"Hortonworks Inc. is changing the way it updates its Hadoop distribution, creating separate release streams for Hadoop's core components and related open source technologies surrounding the distributed processing framework."

"Starting with a 2.4 version of the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) distribution, which became available yesterday, the company said it's trying to better balance somewhat conflicting user requests for stability and innovation by releasing software updates at two different tempos"

Hortonworks, of course, competes fiercely with Cloudera and other companies focused on Hadoop, so its new release cycle plans may represent an advantage.

 More details are available here.