Cloudera Altus Data Warehouse: Product Overview and Insight

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Bottom Line:

Cloudera is more specialized that the other cloud databases in this guide that does not deal with transactional database traffic. Instead, it is an analytic database, which has a relational SQL-based query system.

It scored well behind the others in peer reviews, especially in support and ease of deployment. Those needing regular database functions, therefore, should elsehwhere. But for those with heavy analytical requirements, using Hadoop, or already operating on a Cloudera platform, it should definitely be considered.

Description:

Cloudera Altus Data Warehouse (DW) is a data warehouse as-a-service, built with a hybrid, cloud-native architecture. It offers analytics, governance, and performance. It runs on Microsoft Azure and AWS. Powered by Apache Impala, Altus DW provides the same capabilities as an on-prem, big data analytics in the cloud. It provides the scale, performance and hybrid flexibility to quickly and economically capitalize on new business requirements and opportunities.

Features include:

• The ability to maintain lineage and history for transient workloads for governance and compliance.

• Enabling encryption at rest and in motion, with choice of key management, configured for clusters on creation and it’s GDPR and SOC2 compliant and is undergoing SOC2 certification.

It is not designed for transactional storage or processing. But its analytics capabilities are strong. Also, it is primarily aimed at structured data in relational tables with SQL compliance. However, it can also be used for unstructured data.

Its underlying Apache Impala platform offers read/write support on Amazon S3, which provides cloud capabilities such as direct querying of data from S3, elastic scaling of compute, and data portability and flexibility for cloud-based analytic databases. It can work with data stored on shared data platforms like Apache Hadoop’s HDFS filesystem, columnar storage, and object stores like S3. By being able to query data from multiple sources stored in different, it decouples data and compute and lets users query data without having to move/load data.

Type:

Relational and non-relational.

“Cloudera has all the security and governance features required in a highly regulated finance industry and the necessary integrations of

open source technologies,” said a software developer in the finance sector.

Performance:

For multi-user queries, has an average response time of 12.8s compared to over 1.6 minutes for alternative approaches.

Scalability:

Data workloads exceeding 50 PB serving clusters with hundreds of compute nodes.

Additional Features:

Altus DW utilizes Cloudera SDX to provide a shared catalog, unified security, consistent governance, and full data lifecycle management across applications.

Core Markets

• Analytics applications

• Hadoop

• Finance, retail, manufacturing, and healthcare.

“Cloudera Support is the best you can get. We have gotten resolutions within few hours sometimes within minutes,” said an Analytics Lead in the energy sector.

Pricing:

$0.24 per hour