The Hadoop stack: Cloudera’s focus and roadmap

Today, the popular open source data management framework, Hadoop, is already enabling management and querying of big data in industries like healthcare, banks, telcos and more.

One of the first companies to bring it mainstream, Cloudera, also has as its Chief Architect, the founder of Hadoop Doug Cutting, having a huge say about what a Hadoop technology stack should look like.

Cutting admitted, the future is hard to predict, but a few things remain core for Cloudera – speed, security and integration.

Of course speed is essential, and their relationship with chip maker, Intel, sees them working to optimise their solutions on Intel chips.

With businesses looking towards cloud computing, Cloudera is also readying solutions to take advantage of that. Cutting said, “The future for cloud is to try make different technologies better integrated and secure.”

Cutting believes in encryption for data at rest and data in motion.

He also believes in standard ways in deploying security. “We have to make it secure. Most open source projects do not have security as an initial requirement, but enterprises expect security and spend time retrofitting it into their systems in a way so that it coordinates well with their data management tools.”

Cloud’s big role

Cutting observed how take up of Hadoop on the cloud is slow but steady. “We see most of our customers still bringing their Hadoop systems on-premise. But as we see more moving to the cloud, we support that.

“We operate on-premise and on the cloud, with a product offering that works in cloud with Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft.”

Cutting also talked about a layer on top of these different clouds, that would allow businesses to move data easily between cloud providers.“We are trying to build that at Cloudera – a single interface that folks can develop their apps against, and run in different clouds,” he described.

In conclusion, Cutting opined, “Our future roadmap is watching what the new technologies that are most useful, are. We don’t know what these will be, but we are picking and developing so that they are appropriate for enterprises in terms of integration with the rest of the Hadoop stack.”