Cloudera on AWS

My main use case for Cloudera Data Platform  is dealing with large volumes of data and primarily handling unstructured data by combining structured and unstructured data on this platform.

I use Cloudera Data Platform  for handling unstructured data primarily in a healthcare company where there are many research notes, which are handwritten notes. Using this platform, we have performed PDF extraction where we store PDF data and then extract the data by performing PDF extraction using this platform. That is one use case. The second use case is mainly dealing with voice files. We store the voice files, convert voice to text, and then perform text analytics on that. It is basically dealing with call center voice files.

Cloudera Data Platform has impacted my organization positively in many ways. I belong to the service industry, and many of my customers are using this platform. They are predominantly using Cloudera Data Platform mainly from the banking domain.

It has made things better for those banking customers by providing all of the above.

The best features Cloudera Data Platform offers are from the earlier version, and if you see the latest version, there is significant change. It is very much end-user friendly. There are many user interfaces that they have added. A single pane for administration is easy from a data engineering perspective. You can use drag and drop more in the UI features; they are providing good dashboards to understand the performance of your platform. Ready metrics are available. It is very easy administration from a data platform standpoint. There are many other areas such as data principles including lineage and data security, all of which are really coming out of the box of this platform.

The dashboards and drag-and-drop tools have helped my team because the metrics are already available. As an administrator of the platform, certain key metrics are already available as a dropdown. You can select and pick whichever you want, and based on that, you will be able to see memory utilization and disk utilization. Based on that, you can make a decision such as whether you need to do some performance tweaks or add more hardware to your clusters. Those sorts of insights and early alerts help you to do that. That is also another feature available within the platform. From the administration perspective, it is really helpful for the data administrator or a platform administrator.

Cloudera Data Platform can be improved in several areas. I recently attended their roadmap session. Whatever limitations they have identified involve moving data from on-premises to cloud as a single-pane view and better lineage. They have done some recent acquisitions as well to overcome their product limitations. They are on the right track by doing this analysis themselves, identifying what the weaknesses are, and then using mergers or acquisitions to overcome them.

I would like to add that, beyond the platform itself, they should provide more training to systems integrators so that they can have a more ready workforce to use Cloudera Data Platform.

I have been using Cloudera Data Platform for almost ten years.

Cloudera Data Platform is pretty stable in my experience; there are not any downtime or reliability issues.

In large environments or with growing data needs, I have seen hundred-node clusters running fine, dealing with petabytes of data. I have not seen any issues. When we go for node addition or node rebalancing, there are sometimes issues usually dealt with. It is not a major issue per se; it is more about how you deal with that particular situation.

I manage scalability with Cloudera Data Platform, and the current features available are better now. They have the cloud burst feature available where if the on-premises capacity is not sufficient at a point in time, you can run that Spark job on the cloud itself. The cloud burst feature which they have recently added allows better scalability from a perspective to utilize a better ecosystem provider as well.

My experience with customer support for Cloudera Data Platform is good. I have not majorly dealt with them, but whatever I have heard from my various team members indicates that customer support is good. They provide good pre-sale support and overall handholding to identify the right use case and technologies. Overall, they provide good support from the company.

Customer support is responsive and knowledgeable, but since I have not actually dealt with them extensively, I will not be able to provide a scale on one to ten.

I did not use a different solution before Cloudera Data Platform; we used to use only structured databases for our data warehousing solution. It is a move from only structured data or on-premises appliance-based solutions to Cloudera Data Platform.

I have seen a return on investment. There are licensing costs that have been saved when we moved some of the data platforms, decommissioned them, and moved on to this platform. Time has been saved by implementing the right data quality solution so that the team used to spend more time correcting data. The right data quality solution saves time. It helps the time usually spent by business analysts who go to search in Excel to understand data definitions. Now that is something easily available as a part of the data catalog. Such things usually save license cost and money, as the time which business analysts are spending to get more information about the data dictionary is saved as part of the data catalog.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing varies based on your relationship and the size of the cluster. So far, I would say that it is competitive pricing that we have received.

Before choosing Cloudera Data Platform, I did evaluate other options. Earlier, it was Cloudera, Hortonworks, and MapR , but nowadays, with Hortonworks and Cloudera merging, it is predominantly Cloudera Data Platform for big data on-premises.

My advice for others looking into using Cloudera Data Platform is to consider the fact that it has been around for more than a decade, making it a very stable solution. If you want to go with the on-premises solution, that is the way you should go. If you are looking for a solution to deal with large volume, variety of data, and velocity of data including real-time data processing, that is something you should select with this platform. Based on the industry, there are various use cases available in their use case manual where particular use cases are more suitable for the customer's industry; they can also help you select the right services or the right product stack from Cloudera. It is all good, and you should leverage their professional services to get a better and more suitable product architecture. I would rate this product an eight out of ten.

A quick specific example of the type of sensitive data I'm hosting is related to personally identifiable information as well as data which is financial and transactional in nature, and Cloudera Data Platform  helps with compliance by giving us a uniform approach to this. We have implemented the compliance-based entitlements using toolkits provided by Cloudera Data Platform and have our own implementation for each region where we are hosting the data.

The best features Cloudera Data Platform offers include their Kafka and Spark offerings, which we are using majorly, along with the Sqoop offering and a bit of Airflow  here and there. The standout offering we have used from them is the Spark engine and the Impala engine to query our data, making the Impala cluster the best thing we have used from them.

Using the Spark and Impala engines makes my daily work easier and more efficient because Impala gives us a way to easily do analysis on the data, which simplifies the work of a business analyst as well as a PM when they are doing the initial analysis before the actual development begins for Spark, helping reduce the overall development cycle time.

Cloudera Data Platform has impacted my organization positively by providing cost-saving benefits, which is the North Star because of which we have shifted to it. We had data distributed across many platforms before starting this, and now the entire data strategy is designed around Cloudera Data Platform because it is very simple and very configurable.

While I do not have exact numbers, I can tell you that we are processing more than a million data points every day on Cloudera Data Platform.

I don't have anything else to add about needed improvements regarding support, documentation, or other features.

My advice for others looking into using Cloudera Data Platform is to start with using the cloud and see if you can stay on the cloud if your domain allows, because being on the cloud gives you faster adoption to new technologies as well as distributed technical implementation, which provides more stability and flexibility.

I would rate this product a seven out of ten.

My main use case for Cloudera Data Platform  is that I am a certified administrator. I use Cloudera Data Platform  in my daily work by managing it as a whole in a Telco company. I regularly handle tasks by managing Cloudera Data Platform and being responsible for its services, which are currently up and running, and managing daily administrative tasks.

In my experience, the best features Cloudera Data Platform offers are that all the services provided are excellent.

A particular service that stands out to me in Cloudera Data Platform is the performance, which runs very fast. I also find very good features in data security, data reliability, and data lineage.

Cloudera Data Platform's Manager UI and other UIs are very useful and helpful for managing operations.

Cloudera Data Platform has positively impacted my organization as it comes in very handy while performing on big data and handling large files.

I think Cloudera Data Platform is good enough to run now, and I do not see areas for significant improvement.

I wish Cloudera Data Platform would add a service, apart from Ozone , to handle small files with faster performance, so as not to use Ozone  or add extra hard disk capacity to the cluster.

I have been using Cloudera Data Platform for approximately five years.

Cloudera Data Platform is very stable in my experience.

Scalability of Cloudera Data Platform is very good and scalable in public cloud. However, it is not as scalable on on-premises private cloud, which adds considerable cost.

I have interacted with the customer support team extensively, and they are very useful and helpful in resolving issues. I would rate the customer support of Cloudera Data Platform ten out of ten.

Before choosing Cloudera Data Platform, my organization was using Teradata , and we did not evaluate other options.

We are using Cloudera Data Platform  to migrate and run our ETL processes, transferring data from multiple RDBMS  to a data lake for analysis purposes. The current organization I work for is a top bank with a data lake of more than one petabyte.

Cloudera Data Platform  is a perfect tool to manage such vast amounts of big data, store it properly, query it, and move it from one end to another.

The most useful feature I currently use from Cloudera Data Platform is the Hue tool, which provides a web-based utility. Users don't need network access approval when using on-premises internal access. Additionally, Spark and Impala are the most useful tools that I have used from Cloudera Data Platform.

The current organization I work for is a top bank with a data lake of more than one petabyte. For this specific purpose, Cloudera Data Platform is a perfect tool to manage such vast amounts of big data, store it properly, query it, and move it from one end to another.

Cloudera Data Platform should use fewer tools and remove the complexity between them. It should make it easier for the end user to change the configuration and understand it better.

The UI tool for jobs in Cloudera Data Platform can be improved to provide a proper image of ETL jobs and detailed consolidated graphs to monitor Spark-based Hue jobs.

I have been working on a big data platform for the last five years, starting from 2020. Initially, I worked on Hortonworks platform for the last two to three years. Since Cloudera and Hortonworks merged into a single platform which is Cloudera Data Platform, I have been working on the CDP platform for the last two years.

We face downtime and reliability issues many times a week with Cloudera Data Platform because it is a very complex system and all configurations are managed by the end user. Sometimes the end user is not experienced or does not have all the expertise related to Cloudera specifically, making it very difficult to manage properly.

For scalability, I would rate Cloudera Data Platform nine out of 10. We periodically have requirements to add resources or servers, and we find it very useful from a scalability perspective.

The customer support from Cloudera is good when we receive support from non-Indian representatives. When support comes from Indian representatives, we receive level one support only.

Previously we were using Hive  tool for querying engine, but since installing Impala, we witnessed huge performance improvements with Cloudera Data Platform. The majority of users are using Impala instead of Hive  because Impala uses MPP, massively parallel processing technology.

If the only requirement is to have an on-premises system without other options, then Cloudera Data Platform is the best option available. However, if cloud is an option, I would prefer cloud more than on-premises Cloudera system.

We are currently using Cloudera Data Platform with specific tools: Rangers to manage access-related items, HDFS to store files, Hive and Impala to access them, Hue as a query editor, and Spark for ETL execution.

It is a very complex system compared to cloud technology, which is much simpler. Due to this complexity, I rate Cloudera Data Platform six out of 10.