These new certifications from Hortonworks respond to requests from ISVs for additional differentiation as the Hadoop market grows.
Enterprise Hadoop vendor Hortonworks has announced three new enterprise Hadoop certifications for the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) in its Hortonworks Certified Technology Program. The new certifications are: HDP Operations Ready, which covers managing and running applications on HDP from an operational perspective; HDP Security Ready, which validates integration with security-related components of the HDP; and HDP Governance Ready, which provides assurance that data is integrated into the platform as facilitated by the Apache Falcon data workflow engine.
“We have had a certification program in place which makes sure there is a standard level of interopability,” said John Kreisa, vice president of strategic marketing at Hortonworks. “We are seeing continued strong growth and enterprise interest in Hadoop, and as more users plug in, there has been more focus on how these technologies are integrated into the platform, through YARN or Apache Ambari. Similarly, there is an increased focus on security, and on governance, as more is poured into the large data lakes.”
Hortonworks first responded to these issues last June, with the introduction of a YARN-ready certification, on top of the basic certification they offered. It allowed ISVs to demonstrate how they integrated with the YARN API.
“ISVs wanted verification of that additional level of integration they provided because the enterprise was starting to ask about it, and these new certifications are designed for that same purpose,” Kreisa said. “The YARN certification really was the first to focus on which of the APIs you have chosen, to give enterprises more assurance that the applications will work in a certain way. This certification has already been a huge success in the months since it was introduced, so we are continuing to invest in certification programs which provide differentiation for ISVs.”
Kreisa said the certifications follow similar best practises.
“There are test beds we run them through, and the log files are examined by our partner systems engineering team,” he said. “We also help with guidelines, and provide sample code to accelerate integration. Once they’ve completed the integration they submit it, and it’s evaluated by our integration team, and they either get certification or have to make adjustments.”
The Operations Ready certification is for organizations with a tool for monitoring processing in the data centre, like HP OpenView or Microsoft Systems Center.
“It shows they can monitor or manage the application on HDP from an operational perspective,” Kreisa said. This means in practical terms that they integrate with Apache Ambari, using Ambari as a client to an enterprise management system, integrating Ambari-managed Hadoop components through Ambari Stacks, or providing tailored user tools with Ambari Views.
“Several vendors – VMware and Teradata and a few others – will come out of the gate with this at launch,” Kreisa said. “There aren’t a huge number of tools out there for monitoring and managing, but the big vendors have them. There are also more ISVs developing Hadoop applications they want to deploy on the infrastructure.”
The HDP Security Ready certification tests and validates integration with security-related components of the platform. This includes the ability to work in a Kerberos-enabled cluster, the Apache Knox gateway and Apache Ranger, the latter of which came from the technology Hortonworks acquired in May of this year with data security vendor XA Secure, which it then transitioned to an Apache community project.
The HDP Governance Ready certification validates that the data is integrated into the platform through automated and managed data pipelines as described and facilitated by the Apache Falcon data workflow engine.
“The Governance Ready certification is for products that do lifecycle management of data,” Kreisa said. “There will be more products coming into the market on this.”
