The new tie-up between Hortonworks Inc. and Pivotal Labs, cemented with their recent founding of the Open Data Platform (ODP), is showing signs of bearing fruit with the release of the Apache Ambari 2.0 management component for Hadoop.

Amabari 2.0 promises to make life much easier for Hadoop admins who struggle to keep their projects up and running with a host of new features listed under its “What’s new” section, which are described in detail in Hortonworks’ blog post.

The most eye-catching of these include a new alerting framework that provides centralized management of health alerts and checks for services in Hadoop clusters; a new metrics system; automated rolling upgrades to ensure minimal to no cluster downtime during upgrades from one version to the next; and simplified security with automated kerberization of the Hadoop cluster and support for installing and configuring Apache Ranger for centralized security administration, authorization and audit.

While the update will be welcomed by Ambari users, the release does more to reaffirm the commitment of Hortonworks and Pivotal to the newly-established ODP. Most of the work done on making Ambari 2.0 production ready was the result of a collaboration between Hortonworks and its erstwhile ally, according to the project’s team list page. Pivotal does have its own Pivotal Command Center management component for Hadoop, but it is now throwing its weight behind Ambari as an alternative since it signed on with the ODP.

That group, which was formed amid a wave of controversy in February, ostensibly aims to accelerate the adoption of Hadoop in the enterprise by providing a Big Data kernel in the form of a tested reference core of Apache Hadoop, plus related Apache open-source software like Ambari. But it’s also been widely criticized as unnecessary, with some believing it’s just a thinly-veiled effort to sideline rival Hadoop players Cloudera Inc. and MapR Technologies Inc.

Of course Cloudera, which is thought to be the largest Hadoop vendor, doesn’t contribute to Ambari because it provides its own proprietary management tools instead. One of the main reasons it decided to opt out of (and criticize) the ODP is because the group insisted its members had to use Ambari. Cloudera co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer CEO Mike Olsen outlined plenty of other reasons why it doesn’t like the ODP, but according to SiliconANGLE’s Paul Gillin, “Cloudera’s challenge is to stay ahead of the market by providing superior functionality to the open source equivalents of products like Cloudera Manager,” and joining the OPD would have meant adopting Ambari and “essentially … capitulating to Hortonworks.”

If Hortonworks and its allies can iron out Amabari’s most irritating problems, the ODP’s vision of a standardized Hadoop has good chance of gaining impetus, especially among those who dislike swapping out Apache products for proprietary tools. But with both Cloudera and MapR providing their own solutions and support to ensure everything “just works,” Hortonworks has the difficult job of convincing enterprise practitioners that an open source alternative is the better bet.

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