Cloudera Enterprise 5.5 improves the life of the admin through a deeper integration between HUE and Cloudera Manager, as well as a rebase on HUE 3.9.
Cloudera Enterprise 5.5 contains a number of improvements related to HUE (the open source GUI that makes Apache Hadoop easier to use), including easier setup for HUE HA, built-in activity monitoring for improved stability, and better security and reporting via Cloudera Navigator and Apache Sentry (incubating). In this post, we’ll offer an overview of some of these improvements.
Automatic HA and Load Balancing
With this new release, you can now add a built-in load balancer via just a few clicks in Cloudera Manager, whereas in the past, setting up a load balancer involved some extra steps. These steps are still valid and recommended if you use “raw” CDH; however, if you use Cloudera Manager, this new load balancer provides a few advantages:
- Automatic failover to an available healthy HUE in case of crash, network, or host glitch
- Transparent serving of the static files for much better request performance and more responsiveness (cuts down average number of Web requests per page from 60 to 5; that’s a lot of savings with many concurrent users!)
Before (without load balancer)
After (with load balancer)
Adding redundant HUE servers and balancers for more performances and availability
Monitoring of the HUE service is also improved; you can now track the number of active users, requests, and other statistics warning about potential problems:
Monitoring of number of active users and requests
Here’s a video explaining and demonstrating these improvements:
Auditing with Cloudera Navigator
HUE user administration operations can now be audited and written to a configurable audit log. This feature enables tools such Cloudera Navigator to view, search, filter, and generate reports on these audited events. Most important, admins can easily detect when unauthorized attempts at these operations have been made, and capture the related metadata for those unauthorized attempts. (Read more here.)
Cloudera Search
Users can now search “like in Yelp” with a new live filtering that is applied when moving on the map. For better performances, now only the widgets that changed are being refreshed on each search. A full-time mode displays the dashboard in full screen and can be set to refresh automatically every N seconds. Indexed records are editable in the UI and can link to the original document. Saved dashboards can be exported or imported directly from the UI for an easier backup or sharing. (Learn more here.)
Apache Oozie
All dashboard jobs filtering, as well as pagination, now happen in the Oozie backend. Monitoring a large number of jobs is now fast. Various features improves the Coordinator user experience, such as updating the job end time, ignoring some actions. Exporting and importing workflows can now be done directly from the UI for an easier backup. (Learn more here.)
SQL
Statistics on tables and columns can be accessed directly from the assist, as well as the top terms of a column. Apache Hive partitions are much easier to explore with a new editor filter. Links to partitions are now always correct, as well as in strict mode.
Apache HBase
Several impersonations issues have been fixed on the HBase side. Binary upload into cells (like pictures) are now supported, as well as emptying a cell. (Read more here.)
Apache Sentry (incubating)
HUE has new support for the COLUMN scope privilege, allowing finer-grained permissions on tables. The URI scope privilege is now consistent throughout the app.
Next Up!
The underlying work for HUE 4 is well under way, including the unification of all apps for a better global user experience. More performance improvements and optimizations are also in the pipeline.
If you have any questions, feel free to comment here, on the hue-user list or via @gethue!
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