When I was at Optimizely, my team chose Druid for a large-scale analytics application, after a pretty extensive benchmarking. It was very impressive, though not trivial to set up.
Blog post with a bit more detail: https://medium.com/engineers-optimizely/slicing-and-dicing-d...
> we were delighted to find an existing community cookbook, chef-druid, that can configure and deploy a druid cluster. However, that community cookbook hasn’t been updated for nearly a year and does not support the latest version of druid. We have therefore forked off our own version, optimizely/chef-druid, which supports the latest version of druid.
Why didn't you create a pull request to the upstream project? That way, all people who are using the original cookbook could have directly benefit from your improvements, without having to discover the new fork.
Speculating personally, it was probably just something that happened for speed/ease - as opposed to trying to get an apparently abandoned repo rolling again.
We did make optimizely/chef-druid open and public though, and while I'm not with Optimizely any more, I'm sure the good folk there would be more than happy to merge back into the original repo if anyone was still maintaining it and wanted that to happen.