Hortonworks has finally joined the OpenStack Foundation, the independent non-profit that was spun off from its parent initiative at Rackspace in 2012.  It’s not entirely surprising to see Hortonworks’ support of OpenStack, which has gained quite a number of high profile fans and contributors from the very beginning.  As Hortonworks comes into its own, being the latest to join OpenStack is an indication of the company’s commitment to the big data market.

“As our customers investigate big data projects, they are increasingly looking to leverage the agility and elasticity of the cloud for their Apache Hadoop deployments,” said Mitch Ferguson, vice president of business development, Hortonworks. “We remain dedicated to 100-percent open source, enterprise-ready Apache Hadoop, and joining the OpenStack Foundation will help our customers deploy big data solutions on fully open source platforms. By fostering the adoption of Hadoop in the cloud supporting the open source community, Hortonworks is empowering the ecosystem with flexible and cost-effective big data solutions.”

The enterprise users who are willing to get their hands dirty with Hadoop are often inclined to experiment with other open source technologies. Hortonworks’ OpenStack Foundation membership status may prove to be a valuable charisma boost in the future.

The startup’s flagship product, the Hortonworks Data Platform, is completely open. The company recently launched a special edition of the software that can run on a PC with minimal effort on the user end: this scale-down version of HDP is a standalone app that runs in its own VM and automates most of the complicated installation process.

Big data and the open-source cloud have both received a lot of attention lately. Puppet Labs, the creator of a widely-used free management framework for severs, raised $30 million from VMware just a few days ago.  The investment is meant to fund a strategic partnership between the two companies, which will focus primarily on integrating the data center automation platform with VMware’s core cloud solutions line: vCloud Automation Center, vCenter Operations Manager and vCenter Configuration Manager. Puppet Labs is already integrated with vSphere.