Out of curiosity, did all of those clients use CDH (Cloudera Hadoop)? They're pretty much becoming a hegemony in their own right like DataStax and Cassandra

We run both CDH and Cassandra at my employer. DataStax made a play, but they were Oracle level expensive, so we stuck with OSS.

CDH provides benefits in the early days, but at this point it feels more constraining. Their release cadence is slow, so we're stuck writing long term workarounds for bugs that we're fixed two years ago in the upstream project. The stuff that they are working on is half-baked and doesn't support what would seem to be trivial use cases.

I wouldn't be surprised if their ecosystem calcifies now that they are public.

We had a similar experience and walked away very early on. Now run >1k node clusters without outside consulting.

Bit late to reply but it was a mix of the big two. Cloudera and Hortonworks.

And I wouldn't say Cloudera is dominating Hadoop.

Without proper planning, most data lakes end up as the digital equivalent of a super fund site.

We straight up call ours the "data swamp" because no upfront effort was put into governance.