Today Cloudera announced a new Cloudera Academic Partnership program, in which participating universities worldwide get access to curriculum, training, certification, and software. 

As noted in the press release, the global demand for people with Apache Hadoop and data science skills is dwarfing all supply. We consider it an important mission to help accredited universities meet that demand, by equipping them with the content and training they need to educate students in the Hadoop arts.

Furthermore, we are cognizant of the fact that many academic research labs are in need of tools to help deploy, manage, and extend Hadoop clusters. For that reason, CAP members get free access to Cloudera Manager Enterprise Edition for 12 months to support data-intensive testing, development, and research.

It’s always a great thing for everybody when the experts are willing and eager to share.

So, it’s with special pleasure that I can point you toward a new three-part series by Cloudera’s own Tom White (@tom_e_white) to be published in Dr Dobb’s, which has long been one of the publications of record in the mainstream developer world – from which many original programmers learned basics like BASIC. Now, Dobb’s turns its attention to Apache Hadoop, which says a lot about Hadoop’s continuing adoption.

Tom, of course, is the author of the O’Reilly best-seller Hadoop: The Definitive Guide, and few people have a better record of being both knowledgeable and helpful for those who want to learn “how to Hadoop”.

It’s time for me to give you a quarterly update (here’s the one for Q1) about where to find tech talks by Cloudera employees in 2013. Committers, contributors, and other engineers will travel to meetups and conferences near and far to do their part in the community to make Apache Hadoop a household word!

(Remember, we’re always ready to assist your meetup by providing speakers, sponsorships, and schwag.)

A couple highlights:

Cloudera will be a proud exhibitor at O’Reilly OSCON 2013 (July 22-26 in Portland, OR), which in our opinion is a shining light in the open source community. So be sure to look for us!

We also want to take this opportunity to congratulate all speakers who will be presenting at OSCON. Furthermore, we want to highlight the talks led by Clouderans for your personal schedule:

On this special April 1 – the seven-year anniversary of the Apache Hadoop project’s first release – Hadoop founder Doug Cutting (also Cloudera’s chief architect and the Apache Software Foundation chair) offers seven thoughts on Hadoop:

1. Open source accelerates adoption.

   If Hadoop had been created as proprietary software it would not have spread as rapidly. We’ve seen incredible growth in the use of Hadoop. Partly that’s because it’s useful. But many would have been cautious to make a vendor-controlled platform part of their infrastructure, useful or not.

2.  Apache builds collaborative communities.

   The Hadoop ecosystem has hundreds of developers working for tens of organizations. Competitors productively collaborate on a daily basis, improving the software we all share. The Apache Software Foundation gives us the methodology that enables this. (Thanks, Apache!)

3. The timing is right.

In this Charlie Rose interview that aired on March 22, 2013, Cloudera’s Chief Scientist Jeff Hammerbacher (@hackingdata) offers fascinating insights into the origins of Big Data and data science techniques at Google and their re-implementation into open source used by consumer Web companies. Furthermore, he offers great detail about their positive application across healthcare diagnostics and delivery – as well as the overall need for better balance between “numerical imagination” and “narrative imagination” in everything we do (in order to “ask bigger questions”, as some would say).

It’s an incredibly valuable look into where Big Data came from, where it’s going, and how Cloudera is helping it get there.

Hadoop Summit Europe is coming up in Amsterdam next week, so this is an appropriate time to make you aware of the Cloudera speaker program there (all three talks on Thursday, March 21):

Below you’ll find the official announcement from Cloudera and Twitter about Parquet, an efficient general-purpose columnar file format for Apache Hadoop.

Parquet is designed to bring efficient columnar storage to Hadoop. Compared to, and learning from, the initial work done toward this goal in Trevni, Parquet includes the following enhancements:

Hadoop network encryption is a feature introduced in Apache Hadoop 2.0.2-alpha and in CDH4.1.

In this blog post, we’ll first cover Hadoop’s pre-existing security capabilities. Then, we’ll explain why network encryption may be required. We’ll also provide some details on how it has been implemented. At the end of this blog post, you’ll get step-by-step instructions to help you set up a Hadoop cluster with network encryption.

A Bit of History on Hadoop Security

Starting with Apache Hadoop 0.20.20x and available in Hadoop 1 and Hadoop 2 releases (as well as CDH3 and CDH4 releases), Hadoop supports Kerberos-based authentication. This is commonly referred to as Hadoop Security. When Hadoop Security is enabled it requires users to authenticate (using Kerberos) in order to read and write data in HDFS or to submit and manage MapReduce jobs. In addition, all Hadoop services authenticate with each other using Kerberos.

In this installment of “Meet the Instructor,” we speak to San Francisco-based Glynn Durham, one of the big brains behind Cloudera’s Introduction to Data Science training and certification. 

What is your role at Cloudera?
I am a Senior Instructor with Cloudera University, which means I am a road warrior: I will travel anywhere to teach anything to anyone. I teach all the courses Cloudera offers, including custom private training events that I run at customer sites. Right now, I’m especially enjoying teaching Cloudera’s new course, Introduction to Data Science: Building Recommender Systems. In tandem with the rollout of the course, we’re developing Cloudera Certified Professional: Data Scientist exams, which will include a challenging performance-based lab component in addition to the written test.

Prior to Cloudera, I primarily came from a database background. My first corporate job was at Oracle just before it went public. I spent a year producing Oracle’s first batch of course materials for developers and database administrators and then spent several years teaching all kinds of people all over the world. For some time, I was an Oracle Database Administrator. I eventually moved on to the LAMP code stack, and I later worked for MySQL.