Cloudera Launches PaaS Environment for Big Data Apps

One of the more frustrating aspects of any Big Data project is the amount of time and effort spent on just getting the software infrastructure required to support it up and running. Aiming to reduce that complexity, Cloudera this week at the Strata Data 2017 Conference launched a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment for Big Data applications that it will manage on behalf of customers as a cloud service.

David Tishgart, director of product marketing for Cloudera, says the Altus service is ideally suited for batch-oriented data engineering applications that run for a fixed amount of time. In contrast, Tishgart says, Cloudera says it expects most Big Data analytics applications will continue to run on premises. However, Cloudera is committed to expanding the Altus service to support a wider variety of applications, says Tishgart.

Over time, Tishgart says, Cloudera expects Big Data applications based on Hadoop and the Apache Spark in-memory computing framework to become federated across hybrid cloud computing environments. The Altus PaaS running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a first step in that direction, says Tishgart.

Built from the ground up by Cloudera to support Big Data applications, Tishgart says the Altus PaaS environment should substantially reduce the amount of time it takes to stand up a Big Data application.

“We’re trying to make it as easy as possible,” says Tishgart.

Of course, it will be up to each individual IT organization to determine to what degree they want to get involved in provisioning, deploying and managing infrastructure for Big Data applications. But in a lot of cases, Cloudera is clearly betting more than a few data scientists don’t have the time or patience to wait for an internal IT organization to figure all that out.