Ambari is an Apache project (http://ambari.apache.org), which in theory, provides an open source alternative to Cloudera Manager. It is the administration console for the Hortonworks distribution. At the time of writing Hortonworks employees are also the vast majority of the project contributors.

Ambari, as one would expect given its open source nature, relies on other open source products, such as Puppet and Nagios, to provide the management and monitoring of its managed clusters. It also has high-level functionality similar to Cloudera Manager, that is, the installation, configuration, management, and monitoring of a Hadoop cluster, and the component services within it.

It is good to be aware of the Ambari project as the choice is not just between full lock-in to Cloudera and Cloudera Manager or a manually managed cluster. Ambari provides a graphical tool that might be worth consideration, or indeed involvement, as it matures. On an HDP cluster, the Ambari...