On behalf of the Apache Bigtop team, I'd love to announce the general availability of the Bigtop 1.2.1 release.
A few highlights of the 1.2 series release include:
• 6 Distros, 2 archs(x86 and ppc64le) supported
• A newly introduced Bigtop Sandbox feature, which brings you the best Big Data experience
• A faster Docker Provisioner which is rewritten to fully embrace Docker ecosystem
• OpenJDK 8 support. Yes, all components are built on JDK8
• Hadoop 2.7.3, Spark 2.1.1, HBase 1.1.9, and Zeppelin 0.72 are used
• and many upgrades of the ecosystem projects
(Apex, Crunch, Flume, Ignite, Mahout, Oozie, Phoenix, and many others)

With Bigtop 1.2.1 the community continues to deliver the most advanced big data stack to date. More details: BIgtop 1.2.1 Release

Deploying Bigtop is easy: grab the repo/list file for your favorite Linux distribution:
  https://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.lua/bigtop/bigtop-1.2.1/repos/
and you'll be running your very own bigdata cluster in no time!

Alternatively, you can use Bigtop Provisioner to spin-up a virtual cluster with a single command as explained in Bigtop Provisioner User Guide
Finally, I encourage everyone to give our brand new feature Bigtop Sandbox a try: How to build and run Bigtop Sandbox (Experimental) Feedback is welcome!
I want to emphasize that this is a collaborative work done by project contributors and other communities, who continue to devote time to make Bigtop a better software. Thank you all for making this release possible!