With Cloudera Director, cloud deployments of Apache Hadoop are now as enterprise-ready as on-premise ones. Here’s the technology behind it.

As part of the recent Cloudera Enterprise 5.2 release, we unveiled Cloudera Director, a new product that delivers enterprise-class, self-service interaction with Hadoop clusters in cloud environments. (Cloudera Director is free to download and use, but commercial support requires a Cloudera Enterprise subscription.) It provides a centralized administrative view for cloud deployments and lets end users provision and scale clusters themselves using automated, repeatable, managed processes. To summarize, the same enterprise-grade capabilities that are available with on-premise deployments are now also available for cloud deployments. (For an overview of and motivation for Cloudera Director, please check out this blog post.)

The Transaction Processing Council (TPC), working with Cloudera, recently announced the new TPCx-HS benchmark, a good first step toward providing a Big Data benchmark.

In this interview by Roberto Zicari with Francois Raab, the original author of the TPC-C Benchmark, and Yanpei Chen, a Performance Engineer at Cloudera, the interviewees share their thoughts on the next step for benchmarks that reflect real-world use cases.

Unique across all options, Cloudera Manager makes it easy to do what would otherwise be a disruptive operation for operators and users.

For the increasing number of customers that rely on enterprise data hubs (EDHs) for business-critical applications, it is imperative to minimize or eliminate downtime — thus, Cloudera has focused intently on making software upgrades a routine, non-disruptive operation for EDH administrators and users.

Oozie’s new HA qualities help cluster operators sleep well at night. Here’s how it works.

One of the big new features in CDH 5 for Apache Oozie is High Availability (HA). In designing this feature, the Oozie team at Cloudera had two main goals: 1) Don’t change the API or usage patterns, and 2) the user shouldn’t even have to know that HA is enabled. In other words, we wanted Oozie HA to be as easy and transparent as possible. 

Understanding how checkpointing works in HDFS can make the difference between a healthy cluster or a failing one.

Checkpointing is an essential part of maintaining and persisting filesystem metadata in HDFS. It’s crucial for efficient NameNode recovery and restart, and is an important indicator of overall cluster health. However, checkpointing can also be a source of confusion for operators of Apache Hadoop clusters.

Cloudera’s own enterprise data hub is yielding great results for providing world-class customer support.

Here at Cloudera, we are constantly pushing the envelope to give our customers world-class support. One of the cornerstones of this effort is the Cloudera Support Interface (CSI), which we’ve described in prior blog posts (here and here). Through CSI, our support team is able to quickly reason about a customer’s environment, search for information related to a case currently being worked, and much more.

This FAQ contains answers to the most frequently asked questions about the architecture and configuration choices involved.

In December 2013, Cloudera and Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced a partnership to support Cloudera Enterprise on AWS infrastructure. Along with this announcement, we released a Deployment Reference Architecture Whitepaper. In this post, you’ll get answers to the most frequently asked questions about the architecture and the configuration choices that have been highlighted in that whitepaper.

More and more customers are using automation/configuration management frameworks alongside Cloudera Manager.

As Apache Hadoop clusters continue to grow in size, complexity, and business importance as the foundational infrastructure for an Enterprise Data Hub, the use cases for a robust and mature management console expand. 

Learn the new features and enhancements in Cloudera Manager 5, including support for YARN, management of third-party apps and frameworks, and more.

The response to the Oct. 2013 release of Cloudera Enterprise 5 Beta has been overwhelming, and Cloudera is busily working closely with several customers to incorporate their feedback.

Get an overview of the available mechanisms for backing up data stored in Apache HBase, and how to restore that data in the event of various data recovery/failover scenarios

With increased adoption and integration of HBase into critical business systems, many enterprises need to protect this important business asset by building out robust backup and disaster recovery (BDR) strategies for their HBase clusters. As daunting as it may sound to quickly and easily backup and restore potentially petabytes of data, HBase and the Apache Hadoop ecosystem provide many built-in mechanisms to accomplish just that.