At Cloudera we’re building the world’s only hybrid data platform that’s founded on open source and truly hybrid. What do we mean by truly hybrid? Well, not only does it seamlessly support on-premises and cloud-based deployments alike, but uniquely, it is cloud vendor agnostic, allowing multi-cloud strategies to thrive.
Cloudera continues to innovate at pace, providing new and exciting features across Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) that many of our customers can’t wait to get their hands on. That said, we recognize that some customers value an option to upgrade to a stable release that will not require major upgrades for an extended period – even at the cost of those innovative new features. Customers that fit into the latter category tend to have complex implementations or run mission-critical workloads on CDP. To better serve their needs, we’ve introduced a Long Term Support (LTS) model that complements our regular releases. The LTS versions will address security or platform stability issues that may arise and will be fully backward compatible. No new features or changes that require extensive testing on the customer side will be included in an LTS version. Ultimately, LTS gives customers confidence in moving to the next stable version of the platform while maintaining security and performance, thereby reducing business risk.
LTS is not a novel concept on its own – many technology vendors have an LTS version of their product that espouses stability with minimal product changes. What differentiates Cloudera’s support model is that we’re founded on community open source projects and provide enterprise support for the projects that make up CDP. Supporting open source projects isn’t completely unique – in fact it has become popular. We see the likes of Google supporting TensorFlow Enterprise, Microsoft supporting PyTorch Enterprise, Red Hat supporting OpenShift and DataStax supporting Apache Cassandra. Like Cloudera, these vendors commit to supporting software that is based on individual open source community projects and offer stable long term support versions of these so customers can focus on using the product to drive business outcomes, rather than managing the technology. Where Cloudera’s approach is unique is that CDP brings together 30+ open source community projects to provide an enterprise grade data platform spanning the entire data lifecycle for modern organizations. This requires careful integration of many Apache projects, each with individual release cycles and updates, in order to provide a complete data platform. As illustrated below, some projects have had 10+ releases in the last 12 months and there’s a cacophony of release frequencies that presents a chaotic software integration landscape to manage.
Release frequency of open-source Apache projects included in CDP
To unify these projects as an enterprise ready platform, they need to be backed by robust support processes across all these projects and integrations – no easy feat by any stretch of imagination! This is exactly what Cloudera delivers across all supported versions of CDP. Now with the LTS version, we’re committed to supporting all of the constituent open source projects versions for the long haul.
Regardless of whether a product is proprietary or open source, product vendors that provide a long term supported release are making a huge investment in engineering resources showing a deep commitment to their customers and underscoring the value of their product in the market. This enables customers to focus on solving business problems, spend less time upgrading and regression testing the technology, and ultimately, to reap greater value from their investment.
You can learn more about our LTS model in this community article.