Hadoop vendor Cloudera announced the latest version of its big data distribution on Tuesday, complete with a new visual tool for deploying and managing Hadoop clusters on the Amazon Web Services cloud.
The tool, called Cloudera Director, will give users an interface by which they can deploy, manage and provision the full Cloudera Hadoop distribution on AWS. Senior Director of Product Marketing Clarke Patterson acknowledged that has not been easy to date while still maintaining the breadth of capabilities. Although there’s no difference between the cloud version and the on-premises version of the software, he added, the Director interface is designed to be self-service and includes cloud-specific capabilities such as instance-tracking so administrators can keep an eye on whose cloud instances are costing what.
While deploying production [company]Cloudera[/company] workloads in the cloud is not yet anywhere near commonplace, customers are definitely thinking about it and asking about it, Patterson said — especially with regard to hybrid cloud-local architectures. Cloudera actually began its life pushing its software on AWS, and is just now coming back around on the cloud as the capabilities — and costs — of platforms such as AWS have improved. The company announced a cloud partner program last year, as well as some specific integrations with AWS.
Aside from fulfilling customers’ desires, getting more users deploying on AWS would probably make Cloudera’s life easier, too. As the company’s vice president of engineering, Peter Ellis-Cooper, told me earlier this year, the company would like to move customers to a shorter list of reference architectures in part to ease of the burden of having to certify Cloudera’s software in so many different environments. He called cloud-optimization a top-level engineering initiative.
