Cloudera Impala has many exciting features, but one of the most impressive is the ability to analyze data in multiple formats, with no ETL needed, in HDFS and Apache HBase. Furthermore, you can use multiple frameworks, such as MapReduce and Impala, to analyze that same data. Consequently, Impala will often run side-by-side with MapReduce on the same physical hardware, with both supporting business-critical workloads. For such multi-tenant clusters, Impala and MapReduce both need to perform well despite potentially conflicting demands for cluster resources.

In this post, we’ll share our experiences configuring Impala and MapReduce for optimal multi-tenant performance. Our goal is to help users understand how to tune their multi-tenant clusters to meet production service level objectives (SLOs), and to contribute to the community some test methods and performance models that can be helpful beyond Cloudera.

Defining Realistic Test Scenarios

As you may know, Apache HBase has a vibrant community and gets a lot of contributions from developers worldwide. The collaborative development effort is so active, in fact, that a new point-release comes out about every six weeks (with the current stable branch being 0.94).

At Cloudera, we’re committed to ensuring that CDH, our open source distribution of Apache Hadoop and related projects (including HBase), ships with the results of this steady progress. Thus, CDH 4.2 was rebased on 0.94.2, as compared to its predecessor CDH 4.1, which was based on 0.92.1. CDH 4.3 has moved one step further and is rebased on 0.94.6.1.

Yesterday we announced the availability of Cloudera Manager 4.6. As part of this release, the Free Edition of Cloudera Manager (now a part of Cloudera Standard) has been enhanced significantly to include many features formerly only available with a subscription license:

Today is a big day: Cloudera is not only urging our customers to “Unaccept the Status Quo” (the continued and accelerating spending on data warehousing, expensive data storage, and associated software licenses), but we also announced that Cloudera Search has entered public beta. Now anyone who knows how to do a Google search can query data stored in Cloudera’s Platform for Big Data.

In this post, however, I’d like to explain the new, simpler product naming/packaging structure that will make adopting and deploying Cloudera more straightforward.

Introducing Cloudera Standard

One of the unexpected pleasures of open source development is the way that technologies adapt and evolve for uses you never originally anticipated.

Seven years ago, Apache Hadoop sprang from a project based on Apache Lucene, aiming to solve a search problem: how to scalably store and index the internet. Today, it’s my pleasure to announce Cloudera Search, which uses Lucene (among other things) to make search solve a Hadoop problem: how to let non-technical users interactively explore and analyze data in Hadoop.

I’m pleased to announce that CDH 4.3 is released and available for download. This is the third quarterly update to our GA shipping CDH 4 line and the 17th significant release of our 100% open source Apache Hadoop distribution.

CDH 4.3 is primarily focused on maintenance. There are more than 400 bug fixes included in this release across the components of the CDH stack. This represents a great step forward in quality, security, and performance.

This week I’d like to highlight King.com, a European social gaming giant that recently claimed the throne for having the most daily active users (more than 66 million). King.com has methodically and successfully expanded its reach beyond mainstream social gaming to dominate the mobile gaming market — it offers a streamlined experience that allows gamers to pick up their gaming session from wherever they left off, in any game and on any device. King.com’s top games include “Candy Crush Saga” and “Bubble Saga”.

And — you guessed it — King.com runs on CDH.

Have you ever wished you could upgrade to the latest CDH minor release with just a few mouse clicks, and even without taking any downtime on your cluster? Well, with Cloudera Manager 4.5 and its new “Parcel” feature, you can!

That release introduced many new features and capabilities related to parcels, and in this FAQ-oriented post, you will learn about most of them.

What are parcels?

Editor’s Note (Dec. 11, 2013): As of Dec. 2013, the Cloudera Development Kit is now known as the Kite SDK. Links below are updated accordingly.

At Cloudera, we have the privilege of helping thousands of developers learn Apache Hadoop, as well as build and deploy systems and applications on top of Hadoop. While we (and many of you) believe that platform is fast becoming a staple system in the data center, we’re also acutely aware of its complexities. In fact, this is the entire motivation behind Cloudera Manager: to make the Hadoop platform easy for operations staff to deploy and manage.

This week, the Cloudera Sessions head to Washington, DC, and Columbus, Ohio, where attendees will hear from AOL, Explorys, and Skybox Imaging about the ways Apache Hadoop can be used to optimize digital content, to improve the delivery of healthcare, and to generate high-resolution images of the entire globe that provide value to retailers, farmers, government organizations and more.

I’d like to take this opportunity to shine a spotlight on Skybox Imaging, an innovative company that is putting Hadoop to work to help us see the world more clearly, literally.