The Google cloud makes room for Hortonworks’ Hadoop distribution

Hortonworks‘ distribution of the Hadoop open-source big data software is hereby now available and supported on the Google’s public cloud, the Google Cloud Platform, Hortonworks said today.

Hot off its debut on the Nasdaq a few weeks ago, Hortonworks is one of a few companies peddling Hadoop, which engineers can use to store, process, and analyze lots of different kinds of data. The idea is to ensure that its customers can put and crunch data wherever they want.

The news comes after some joint development on the part of Google and Hortonworks.

“Our engineering teams have collaborated to integrate ‘bdutil’ with Apache Ambari Blueprints API, to deliver a simple and streamlined provisioning experience for the end user,” Ajay Singh, Hortonworks’ director of technical channels, wrote in a blog post on the news today.

But Google has also been cooperating with other Hadoop vendors lately. Cloudera, arguably the biggest Hadoop vendor of all, worked to enable Google’s new Dataflow system to the Spark open-source engine for fast data processing. And MapR’s Hadoop distribution is also available on the Google cloud.

Meanwhile, the availability of Hadoop in different flavors brings more big data credibility to the Google cloud itself. That’s important because Google is engaged in a battle with other cloud infrastructure providers, including but hardly limited to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft was quick to embrace the Hortonworks Hadoop distribution, back in 2011. Now Hortonworks is showing love to other major cloud providers.