Overview of Cloudera and the Cloudera Documentation Set

Cloudera provides a scalable, flexible, integrated platform that makes it easy to manage rapidly increasing volumes and varieties of data in your enterprise. Cloudera products and solutions enable you to deploy and manage Apache Hadoop and related projects, manipulate and analyze your data, and keep that data secure and protected.

Cloudera provides the following products and tools:
  • CDH—The most complete, tested, and popular distribution of Apache Hadoop and other related open-source projects, including Apache Impala and Cloudera Search. CDH also provides security and integration with numerous hardware and software solutions.
  • Apache Impala—A massively parallel processing SQL engine for interactive analytics and business intelligence. Its highly optimized architecture makes it ideally suited for traditional BI-style queries with joins, aggregations, and subqueries. It can query Hadoop data files from a variety of sources, including those produced by MapReduce jobs or loaded into Hive tables. The YARN resource management component lets Impala coexist on clusters running batch workloads concurrently with Impala SQL queries. You can manage Impala alongside other Hadoop components through the Cloudera Manager user interface, and secure its data through the Sentry authorization framework.
  • Cloudera Search—Provides near real-time access to data stored in or ingested into Hadoop and HBase. Search provides near real-time indexing, batch indexing, full-text exploration and navigated drill-down, as well as a simple, full-text interface that requires no SQL or programming skills. Fully integrated in the data-processing platform, Search uses the flexible, scalable, and robust storage system included with CDH. This eliminates the need to move large data sets across infrastructures to perform business tasks.
  • Cloudera Manager—A sophisticated application used to deploy, manage, monitor, and diagnose issues with your CDH deployments. Cloudera Manager provides the Admin Console, a web-based user interface that makes administration of your enterprise data simple and straightforward. It also includes the Cloudera Manager API, which you can use to obtain cluster health information and metrics, as well as configure Cloudera Manager.
  • Cloudera Navigator—An end-to-end data management and security tool for the CDH platform. Cloudera Navigator enables administrators, data managers, and analysts to explore the large amounts of data in Hadoop, and simplifies the storage and management of encryption keys. The robust auditing, data management, lineage management, lifecycle management, and encryption key management in Cloudera Navigator allow enterprises to adhere to stringent compliance and regulatory requirements.
This introductory guide provides a general overview of CDH, Cloudera Manager, and Cloudera Navigator. This guide also includes frequently asked questions about Cloudera products and describes how to get support, report issues, and receive information about updates and new releases.

Documentation Overview

The following guides are included in the Cloudera documentation set:

Guide

Description

Overview of Cloudera and the Cloudera Documentation Set

Cloudera provides a scalable, flexible, integrated platform that makes it easy to manage rapidly increasing volumes and varieties of data in your enterprise. Cloudera products and solutions enable you to deploy and manage Apache Hadoop and related projects, manipulate and analyze your data, and keep that data secure and protected.

Cloudera Release Notes

This guide contains release and download information for installers and administrators. It includes release notes as well as information about versions and downloads. The guide also provides a release matrix that shows which major and minor release version of a product is supported with which release version of Cloudera Manager, CDH and, if applicable, Cloudera Impala.

Cloudera QuickStart

This set of guides describes ways to rapidly begin experimenting with Cloudera software. The first section describes how to download and use QuickStart virtual machines, which provide everything you need to try CDH, Cloudera Manager, Impala, and Cloudera Search. Subsequent sections show you how to create a new installation of Cloudera Manager 5, CDH5, and managed services on a cluster of four hosts and an unmanaged CDH pseudo cluster. Quick start installations are for demonstration and POC applications only and are not recommended for production use.

Cloudera Installation Guide

This guide provides instructions for installing Cloudera software.

Cloudera Upgrade

This topic provides an overview of upgrade procedures for Cloudera Manager and CDH. The procedures described here use Cloudera Manager to perform some or all of the upgrade steps. You can also upgrade unmanaged CDH clusters (clusters that are not managed by Cloudera Manager). See Upgrading Unmanaged CDH Using the Command Line.

Cloudera Administration

This guide describes how to configure and administer a Cloudera deployment. Administrators manage resources, availability, and backup and recovery configurations. In addition, this guide shows how to implement high availability, and discusses integration.

Cloudera Data Management

This guide describes how to perform data management using Cloudera Navigator. Data management activities include auditing access to data residing in HDFS and Hive metastores, reviewing and updating metadata, and discovering the lineage of data objects.

Cloudera Operation

This guide shows how to monitor the health of a Cloudera deployment and diagnose issues. You can obtain metrics and usage information and view processing activities. This guide also describes how to examine logs and reports to troubleshoot issues with cluster configuration and operation as well as monitor compliance.

Cloudera Security

This guide is intended for system administrators who want to secure a cluster using data encryption, user authentication, and authorization techniques. It provides conceptual overviews and how-to information about setting up various Hadoop components for optimal security, including how to setup a gateway to restrict access.

Apache Impala - Interactive SQL

This guide describes Impala, its features and benefits, and how it works with CDH. This topic introduces Impala concepts, describes how to plan your Impala deployment, and provides tutorials for first-time users as well as more advanced tutorials that describe scenarios and specialized features. You will also find a language reference, performance tuning, instructions for using the Impala shell, troubleshooting information, and frequently asked questions.

Cloudera Search Guide

This guide provides instructions for installing Cloudera software.

Spark Guide

This guide describes Apache Spark, a general framework for distributed computing that offers high performance for both batch and interactive processing. The guide provides tutorial Spark applications, how to develop and run Spark applications, and how to use Spark with other Hadoop components.

Cloudera Glossary

This guide contains a glossary of terms for Cloudera components.