Exciting times for the Apache Bigtop
community and the Apache Hadoop ecosystem at large with the release
of the brand new Apache Bigtop 0.7.0!

This new release brings tons of new
features and fixes for the beloved 100% community and open source
driven big data distribution.

Among the new features:

  • Addition of Phoenix,
    the Apache HBase SQL layer project

  • Addition of Apache Spark (incubating), the
    general-purpose cluster computing system

  • A brand new SolrCloud 4.5
    integration with HDFS

  • Improvement to our puppet recipes
    so setting up your Apache Bigtop toolchain will be easier than ever

  • Addition of a new script
    init-hdfs.sh to initialize Apache HDFS filesystem structure so you
    can get up and running without manually setting up a complex
    directory structure

  • Add flexibility in the way Apache
    Oozie     manages its Apache Tomcat application

  • Add a new standard location to
    install SQL connectors and other plug-ins

Also this releases fixes:

  • Libsnappy is now included in
    Apache Hadoop packages

  • Clean up some dependencies
    throughout our packages

  • Update to our documentation

Of course this release brings its set
of upgrades:

  • Apache Hadoop 2.0.6-alpha

  • Apache Giraph 1.0.0

  • Apache Flume 1.4.0

  • Apache Pig datafu 1.0.0

  • Apache Crunch 0.7.0

  • Apache HBbase 0.94.12

  • Apache Hive 0.11.0

  • Hue 2.5.1

  • Apache Mahout 0.7.5

  • Apache Solr 4.5.0

And as usual Apache Bigtop supports and
provide convenience artifacts for a wide array of GNU/Linux
distributions:

  • Centos 5

  • Centos 6

  • Fedora 17

  • Fedora 18

  • Ubuntu Lucid

  • Ubuntu Precise

  • Ubuntu Quetzal

  • OpenSUSE 12

  • SLES11

With convenience repositories available: from http://www.apache.org/dist/bigtop/bigtop-0.7.0/repos/

Overall Apache Bigtop 0.7.0 is a great
release and is in the continuity of what the previous ones brought to
the field:

  • Stability

  • Reliability

  • Feature rich

The first release candidate uncovered a
few issues which were promptly fixed for the following and last
release candidate RC1.

As a developer of the distribution and
a user, everything felt right and worked out of the box. I was even
able to set up in a very short time an Apache Hadoop cluster shipping
its logs to Apache Flume and aggregating them into an ElasticSearch
cluster. Everything being visualized with Kibana.

I would like to take the opportunity to
thank all the members Apache Bigtop community for all the effort put
into such a great community and distribution.

I would also like to encourage everyone
to give a try to our latest release and to not hesitate to come in,
participate and give any feedback on our mailing lists: http://bigtop.apache.org/mail-lists.html  .