Cloudera vision and strategy

Today the joint vision for the new Cloudera was shared. It was interesting to hear their strategy going forward. I was expecting to hear something revolutionary and new but seems very much the same as other companies at the moment.

Here is a summary of the points.

They will be the only provider to run across all cloud providers Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, IBM and Oracle. Both companies had the same vision to make the impossible possible, to transform data into clear and actionable insights and be committed to open source to give flexibility to its customers.
Cloudera want to

• Invest in real time streaming at the edge
• Be enterprise grade
• Cloud native
• A data warehouse
• Provide AI industrialization
• To deliver the industries first enterprise data cloud

They are developing the next generation platform called the Cloudera Data Platform. It will consist of

100% open source
The best of HDP3 + CDH 6
Hybrid and multi-cloud
Unified, from the edge to AI
Supported through till at least January 2022
Provide predictable and flexible migration paths
To separate compute and storage using technologies like Kubernetes
Have a consistent security ecosystem




There are two application changes:

The Cloudera Data Science workbench will now work with HDP.

HDF to work with CDH

Cloudera talked about the industrialization of AI which requires strategy, people and organization, security,governance and compliance and technology for an enterprise grade AI operation.

Cloudera have launched a new machine learning powered platform by Kubernetes. It is in preview.

From the Edge to AI

Hortonworks completed their merger with Cloudera to make them the second largest open source software company in the world. The company is now called Cloudera. The combined platform will enable enterprises to create greater value from data with:

• The right data analytics, running on data anywhere
• Strong enterprise-grade and enterprise-wide data security, governance and management
• Flexibility to choose among multi and hybrid clouds

There is a virtual event on 10 January from the edge to AI to hear about their vision and direction.

Hortonworks Data Analytics Studio and Open Hybrid Architecture

Hortonworks has announced the general availability of Hortonworks Data Analytics Studio (DAS). A new service to enable enhanced productivity of business analysts by delivering faster insights from data at scale. DAS is part of the Hortonworks DataPlane Service (DPS). DPS enables businesses to discover, manage, govern and now optimize their data spread across hybrid environments. DAS leverages open-source technologies such as Apache Hive to share and extend the value of a modern data architecture in heterogeneous environments. It includes a useful database heat map.

Hortonworks have also shared the Open Hybrid Architecture Initiative, designed to enable big data workloads to run in a hybrid manner across on-premises, multi-cloud and edge architectures.

The Open Hybrid Architecture initiative will

• De-coupling storage, with both file system interfaces and an object-store interface to data.
• Containerizing compute resources for elasticity and software isolation.
• Sharing services for metadata, governance and security across all tiers.
• Providing DevOps/orchestration tools for managing services/workloads via the “infrastructure is code” paradigm to allow spin-up/down in a programmatic manner.
• Designating workloads specific to use cases such as EDW, data science, rather than sharing everything in a multi-tenant Hadoop cluster.

Apache Calcite: A Foundational Framework

At ACM SIGMOD/PODS 2018, this week, Hortonworks are talking about Calcite.  A foundational framework for optimized query processing over heterogeneous data sources. It seems an interesting dynamic data management framework that omits some key functions: storage of data, algorithms to process data, and a repository for storing metadata.  

The main goal was to originally improve Apache Hive in three different axes: latency, scalability, and SQL support. Hive and Calcite are more integrated now and the new features for its optimizer aimed to generate better plans for query execution.

It can be used for data virtualization/federation. It supports heterogeneous data models and stores (relational, semi-structured, streaming, and geospatial). This flexible, embeddable, and extensible architecture is an attractive choice for adoption in big-data frameworks.

DataWorks Summit 2018

This was the first time I had attended the DataWorks summit: Ideas. Insights. Innovation. for big data. I had the privilege to attend the Luminaries dinner on arrival at the conference. The dinner was held for the European data heroes award. The Hortonworks data heroes initiative recognizes the data visionaries, data scientists, and data architects transforming their businesses and organizations through Big Data.

Each day started with a set of keynotes.

Day 1 Opening Keynotes

The Single Most Important Formula for Business Success Scott Gnau - Hortonworks

Changing the Data Game with Open Metadata and Governance Mandy Chessell - IBM

Big Data Success In Practice: The Biggest Mistakes To Avoid Across The Top 5 Business Use Cases Bernard Marr - Bernard Marr & Co.

Munich Re: Driving a Big Data Transformation Andreas Kohlmaier - Munich Re

Scott Gnau opened his talk with an hypothesis “Data is your cloud is your business” Connecting disparate data to provide for real time information enables us to innovated fast. A data strategy is imperative, it needs to include governance, security and adopt rapid change. Data drives our lives everyday from smart edge devices to all businesses.

He concluded with your data strategy is your cloud strategy is your business strategy if (A) =(B) and (B) = (C) then (A) =(C).

Bernard Marr then shared his insights about AI automating more things faster and the fourth industrial revolution.  He mentioned the top 5 business use cases as

• Informing: to make better decisions
• Understand: know you customers better
• Improvement: customer value proposition
• Automation: key business processes
• Monetization: data as an asset

A couple of interesting points raised were about specialist data hunting units to find new data sources and automation requirements to improve operations.  Data diversity is key to improve analytics along with data governance.

Day 2 Keynotes

Renault: A Data Lake Journey Kamelia Benchekroun - Renault Group

Are You Ready For GDPR? Jamie Engesser - Hortonworks, Srikanth Venkat - Hortonworks Inc

Embracing GDPR to Improve Your Business Practices in the Digital Age Enza Iannopollo - Forrester Research

Driving High Impact Business Outcomes from Artificial Intelligence Frank Saeuberlich – Teradata

Day 2 Forester Enza Iannopollo discussed embracing GDPR to improve your business practices in the digital age. Privacy by design and by default requires new business processes to be established and cultural change to happen. GDPR requires compliance across the organization and with external partners. The compliance strategies are only as good as your risk assessment and mitigation. The classification of data is a key place to start. Concluding the sessions with a quote

“Good Data protection normally enables you to do more things with data, not less” Tim Gough Head of Data Protection Guardian News and Media

Data Steward Studio (DSS) was launched at the conference. It is one of several services available for Hortonworks DataPlane Service; it provides a suite of capabilities that allows users to understand and govern data across enterprise data lakes.