News

MapR Opens Big Data App Gallery

• By David Ramel
• June 5, 2014

Apple has its App Store, Google has its Google Play and now MapR Technologies Inc. has its App Gallery for Big Data applications that work with the company's Apache Hadoop distribution.

MapR -- widely considered one of the top three Hadoop distributors along with Hortonworks and Cloudera -- announced the gallery at the ongoing Hadoop Summit 2014 in San Jose, Calif.

The App Gallery features pages for various applications that work with MapR. The company said it went beyond the usual company partner logo/blurb listings that appear on most vendor sites to instead offer complete pages of information such as version compatibility between app versions and MapR products; instructions for download or purchase; setup directions; tutorials; and options for support.

"Aimed at end-user developers, administrators, and analysts who want to develop more sophisticated Big Data capabilities to enhance their business operations and decision-making, the MapR App Gallery offers the benefit of ready-made big data utilities and applications," the company said in a statement.

Developers and companies who submitted the apps are responsible for selling, distributing and supporting them, MapR said, so they might have different policies for the apps, which range from smaller, free community-supported offerings to larger commercial apps with full telephone support.

MapR App Gallery goes live with great company: @datatorrent @elasticsearch @hadapt @hexadata @hpvertica @infobldrs #hadoopsummit

— MapR Technologies (@mapr) June 3, 2014

The gallery features different kinds of apps aimed at three audience types. For example, some are designed for analysis, some are developer tools and some are aimed at administrators. MapR defined an app as "any software that provides value to an end user by interacting with a Hadoop/MapR interface." Featured apps are associated with numerous category tags, such as batch, cluster monitoring, machine learning, search and streaming, among many others.

For example, the HP Vertica Analytics Platform Community Edition is listed in the gallery, tagged with "data ingestion," "data management" and "SQL." Its page includes an App Overview that provides information about the app's functionality and offers a link to a sandbox to get started with the app and MapR. The tab also indicates HP offers no support for the community edition but supplies a link to the community forums.

A Compatibility tab indicates the app version is HP Vertica 7.0.1+ and it works with the MapR 3.0.2+ versions, connecting via NFS. The Documentation tab includes links to the source code respository, installation instructions, verification instructions, use instructions, the sandbox and several company sites.

"Our customers typically run many different applications on a MapR cluster and the App Gallery makes it much easier and faster to achieve success," said Jack Norris, chief marketing officer at MapR. "There is already a broad range of applications available, and we anticipate the number of applications will grow -- particularly those leveraging unique capabilities that enable customers to better optimize revenue, control costs and mitigate risk."

Developers are encouraged to take advantage of MapR's industry-standard APIs by leveraging open interfaces such as storage access via Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) API and NFS; job execution through YARN, Tez, MapReduce and Spark; ecosystem interfaces such as HBase, HiveQL and PigLatin; SQL via technologies such as Drill, Hive and Stinger/Tez; and administration interfaces such as REST. Developers can submit their apps to the gallery here.