Cloudera today used the Hadoop Summit in Santa Clara to announce the latest version of their commercial Cloudera Enterprise solution. Two key features stand out, and they’re clearly intended to make it easier to deploy and work at scale with Hadoop. A new Service and Configuration Manager offers a unified dashboard, and a means to automate the installation, launch, and running of Hadoop components across multiple machines. A related Activity Monitor makes it far easier to watch the progress of large and complex jobs. These are incremental enhancements, but they are important in making Hadoop easier to run in a production environment, and a clear sign of growing maturity in the product. A cut-down version of the new Service and Configuration Manager is also being added to the freely available Cloudera Distribution of Apache Hadoop (CDH), bringing several of the new features to a broader community than Cloudera Enterprise’s paying customers. Elsewhere, as Derrick Harris reported, Yahoo! has unveiled Hortonworks, a direct competitor to Cloudera and another choice for customers who want (or need) more than the unsupported download of some Apache-licensed code.