Hortonworks vs Apache projects

I want to know what is the difference between installing HortonWorks HDP vs installing the components directly from Apache projects? One thing I can think of is that Horton works probably has the packages aligned so that the version of each component is compatible with that of the others within the suite, while getting them directly from Apache projects, I may have to handle version compatibility myself. Is that correct? Is there any other difference involved ignoring the support subscription aspect of it.

Thanks.

Solution

There are a lot of differences between "roll your own" and using a distribution. Some of the most obvious include:

All of the various components and versions have been tested and built to work together - incompatibility between versions (e.g. Hive, Hadoop, Spark, etc.) can be a painful problem to sort through on your own
Most distribution providers, including Hortonworks, will bring patches in from unstable releases into stable releases, so even for the "same" version (e.g. Hive 1.2.1) you're getting a better release than vanilla - these can include both bug fixes and "safe" feature changes
Most distribution providers, including Hortonworks, provide some flavor of centralized platform management. I'm a big fan of Ambari (the one that comes with HDP), for example - it makes configuration and monitoring significantly easier than coordinating a vanilla install

I would strongly recommend against trying to deploy vanilla, unless it's just for learning and playing. HDP community edition is free (both definitions) and a major improvement over doing it yourself. My last deployment of HDP was entirely based on the community edition.