Cloudera: Unlock the Power of Data

Today’s organizations are presented with the overwhelming challenge of trying to quickly harness petabytes of data, leverage it to boost their businesses, and gain invaluable insight into the needs and desires of their customers. It’s hard to imagine facing this constant stream of data and the need to apply information in real-time without a robust team of experts. Enter Cloudera and open-source Hadoop Distribution. 

Cloudera makes this process easy, giving organizations the ability to focus resources on improving the customer experience and not on adding additional staff members to their team. In this article, we will discuss what Cloudera is, where it came from, and how you can use Cloudera products to easily process, track, understand, and manage your data. 

Cloudera’s deep data processing dive

Cloudera is a software company which, for more than a decade, has provided a structured, flexible, and scalable platform, enabling sophisticated analysis of big data using Apache Hadoop, in any environment.

In 2008, key engineers from Facebook, Google, Oracle, and Yahoo came together to create Cloudera. The idea arose from the need to create a product to help everyone harness the power of Hadoop distribution software.

For years, Hadoop had helped businesses and other organizations store, sort, and analyze large volumes of data. Cloudera was launched to help users deploy and manage Hadoop, bringing order and understanding to the data that serves as the lifeblood of any modern organization.

Cloudera allows for a depth of data processing that goes beyond just data accumulation and storage. Cloudera’s enhanced capabilities provide the power to rapidly and easily analyze data, while tracking and securing it across all environments. By using Cloudera’s comprehensive audits and lineage tracing, users can know where data originated and why it matters. 

Cloudera: Open-source Hadoop distribution 

In the last decade, Hadoop has revolutionized big data analytics. As a result, businesses and other users have come to rely on Hadoop’s increased data storage opportunities and boosted data processing capabilities.

Hadoop works by distributing data rapidly across computing clusters, either on-premises or in the cloud, sidestepping the failure rate limitations of even the most powerful individual machines. The data collections can be scaled up to even larger collections of clusters, known as data lakes. Certain core programs form the heart of Hadoop: 

• Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is a file-handling system that divides big data into smaller blocks for distribution across clusters of nodes. 
• Hadoop resource manager YARN guides the distribution of the data blocks.
• MapReduce helps users to—as the name suggests—map various data elements, redistribute data to appropriate nodes, and then reduce, or process, each group of data.

As the use of Hadoop has increased, an ecosystem of programs built around Hadoop’s core has formed to aid data processing, analysis, and management tasks. Still, a steep learning curve has created a demand for integrated platforms and other tools to reduce Hadoop’s complexity for end users.

As a hybrid of open-source Hadoop and proprietary software, Cloudera has emerged as the industry leader in building such platforms for easing access to Hadoop’s depth of data storage, data governance, and analysis opportunities. Cloudera’s suite of programs is designed to help users easily bridge the divide between Hadoop and database management systems SQL and NoSQL. The increased functionality and ease of data analysis helps prevent data lakes from becoming backwaters, where data is dumped, limiting the effectiveness of Hadoop. 

Getting started with Cloudera services

Cloudera offers an array of products to provide businesses with the infrastructure necessary to match their specific big data needs.

• Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub:This is Cloudera’s all-inclusive package, bringing Cloudera’s various components and capabilities together into one bundle. Available as a subscription service in five editions, Cloudera Enterprise eliminates application silos by integrating workloads from data warehouses, engineering, and operational databases. The integration extends to any environment, whether on-premises servers or cloud-based services, such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. This makes data accessible to users wherever it lives and streams. The hybrid nature of Cloudera Hadoop (CDH) gives users the flexibility to configure and manage their data as they choose.
• Cloudera Express: For those looking to explore the data analysis possibilities CDH can offer, Cloudera Express can be an ideal starting point. Although it is not recommended for production, Cloudera Express provides the chance to quickly put Cloudera tools to work on first use cases.
• Cloudera Essentials: This option offers the “essentials” of stepping into CDH. Essentials offers access to CDH, as well as Cloudera’s Manager and Director programs, for fast and easy deployment in any configuration.  Like all paid Cloudera products, Essentials offers access to Cloudera’s customer support services. From Essentials, users can begin to explore other Cloudera offerings to build out a platform to suit their needs. 
• Cloudera Altus: Altus offers a cloud service platform interface to create data pipelines and deploy Cloudera clusters to analyze and process data across public cloud infrastructure, like AWS and Azure. With its data engineering relieves storage and computing constraints, freeing engineers to build data pipelines and multi-tenant applications, and focus on data science on a massive, less expensive scale Altus.
• Cloudera Director: Integrated with Cloudera products, Cloudera Director works in tandem with Cloudera Manager to get users up and running quickly and reliably on any environment. Director enables Cloudera users to run production-ready Cloudera clusters on public cloud infrastructure, such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
• Cloudera Manager: This is the centralized interface gateway that brings users to CDH and Cloudera’s tools. Like Director, Manager is integrated with Cloudera’s products. Automated wizards help users easily control their Cloudera cluster tasks, no matter the scale or environment. Manager also offers users a customizable dashboard to suit their needs. Manager adapts to the ever-evolving Hadoop ecosystem, providing access to new tools and components, such as the latest offerings from Apache Software, directly through the Cloudera interface. Manager also serves as central piece of Cloudera’s data security system: offering backup and disaster recovery features available directly through the platform, and automated authentication that integrates with the Hadoop ecosystem’s tools.  
• Cloudera ImpalaApache Hive: Impala is Cloudera’s SQL interface tool, utilizing many of the same skills and tools already well-known to users of Apache Hive. Impala is built as a massively parallel processing (MPP) engine, capable of rapidly generating results. Its familiar feel and controls allow for easy adoption, getting new and existing SQL tasks up and running and completed quickly.
• Cloudera Operational DB: Powered by open-source technology programs from Apache, Cloudera Operational DB processes and analyzes big data in real-time.  Operational DB can harness data of all types, from numerous sources—including the IoT—and in formats readable by both SQL and NoSQL. Like Cloudera’s other products, Operational DB can be deployed in any environment, whether in a business’ own data center or across the clouds.

Why do businesses use Cloudera?

Just as Hadoop moved data processing and analytics forward by leaps and bounds, so, too, has the evolution of the cloud opened new possibilities and created new challenges. Traditional sources of data have, in recent years, been joined by floods of data from social media, the IoT, and more, in the ever-expanding array of data sources, which can overwhelm existing infrastructures.

Amid the new environment, Cloudera helps businesses:

• Make their data more accessible and secure
• Understand and respond to their customers’ needs and preferences
• Save money and time on data storage, management, and retrieval
• Reduce complexity, enabling a greater focus on research and development

TD Bank, for instance, deployed Cloudera and Talend to build infrastructure that integrates and processes data from over 100 corporate systems, focusing on customer marketing and fraud detection, among others. The new platform includes a cloud data lake, focused on customer behavior and interests.

Overall, the new systems from Cloudera and Talend reduced TD Bank’s data management costs by 60 percent and data storage costs by 98 percent. More importantly, the analytics helped TD Bank continue to provide its 25 million worldwide customers with “legendary customer experience.”

As another example, Herms Arzneimittel, a manufacturer and supplier of high-quality self-medication products, used Cloudera and Talend to integrate data from six different manufacturing systems at distinct points in its manufacturing process. Coupled with a Hadoop data lake, the new integrated system gave Hermes Arzneimittel greater insight into its manufacturing processes, with the ability to perform trend analyses and verify every step of the process for all products.  

Data integration with Cloudera

Big data continues to grow, so the need to not only accumulate data, but process, understand, and manage it has become paramount. Thanks to Hadoop and Cloudera, organizations of all sizes have been given a powerful tool to accomplish these tasks as the streams of data overwhelm legacy systems, traditional data warehouses, and retrieval systems.

But to harness these systems’ full potential, businesses will require an integrated and easy-to-deploy tool. Talend Data Fabric is a comprehensive suite of apps that provide the infrastructure and governance needed to seize the opportunities and meet the challenges presented by the ever-changing data environment.

If you’re ready to design a streamlined data integration pipeline and gain instant value from data, try Data Fabric today.