Cloudera Data Platform Private Cloud Announced

Cloudera, fresh off its Q1 earnings report for FY 2021, continues its momentum towards a fully revamped analytics platform. Just short of eighteen months after the close of its merger with once-rival Hortonworks, the company is filling in the largest missing piece to its Cloudera Data Platform (CDP): the private cloud.

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The platform, united

CDP both consolidates the two companies' legacy Hadoop distributions and puts a cloud-oriented deployment and management abstraction layer over all the raw open source software components within them. It also layers on some sophisticated edge/IoT streaming data capabilities and a recently overhauled machine learning platform, to boot. But CDP's biggest draw is arguably its Kubernetes (K8s)-based deployment architecture that allows customers to spin up CDP clusters in with multi/hybrid cloud carte blanche.

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CDP allows such far-flung assets to be managed together, using the company's centralized Shared Data Experience (SDX) administrative and governance environment. For the public cloud side, according to the company's Web site, CDP runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, with support for Google Cloud Platform coming soon. But running CDP in the private cloud, which the company announced was on its roadmap when CDP launched in September, hadn't yet been supported.

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Private cloud support, in public preview

Today, though, Cloudera is announcing that CDP Private Cloud is available in tech preview, with general availability (GA) slated for later this summer. As with its public cloud support, CDP Private Cloud is K8s-based, and specifically designed to work with IBM Red Hat's OpenShift K8s-based private cloud environment.

Because each of the major cloud providers offers a managed Kubernetes service, and OpenShift offers a similar platform on-premises, CDP workloads are now portable across public clouds and between those and the private cloud. This introduces fungibility between these environments, and lets customers deploy their clusters where most convenient or economical. And now CDP's "burst to the cloud" feature can be exploited for flexibility and agility.

Kubernetes: the great equalizer

With each of the major cloud providers offering its own managed Hadoop/Spark service (and, in some cases, more than one), being an independent in the space had become challenging for Cloudera. But by offering flexible compatibility across all clouds, plus a higher degree of integration between streaming data, analytics, data pipelines/engineering and machine learning, Cloudera has a serious and sizeable value proposition for enterprise customers that the cloud providers cannot counter...at least not yet.

Once CDP Private Cloud reaches GA, possibly coinciding with industry and society largely reopened, the company may find it has its ducks (and elephants) nicely in a row.

Cloudera is a customer of Brust's advisory firm, Blue Badge Insights.