Cloudera is rolling out a public beta release of Cloudera Altus Data Engineering on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. The Altus PaaS offering helps data engineers use on-demand cloud infrastructure to speed the creation and operation of data pipelines that support data-driven applications.
First introduced in spring 2017, the first Cloudera Altus offering included support for Apache Spark, Apache Hive on MapReduce2, and Hive on Spark.
According to Cloudera, the addition of Altus on Azure will provide a unified and enterprise-ready data engineering experience, and allow end users greater choice in cloud infrastructure providers.
As the latest of several collaborations between Microsoft and Cloudera, according to Charles Zedlewski, SVP, Products at Cloudera, the integration is more than simply porting to Azure and includes specific integrations to take advantage of capabilities that Azure does uniquely well, including the Azure Data Lake service, the IoT Hub and PowerBI.
Cloudera Altus Data Engineering on Microsoft Azure aims to simplify the development and operations of data pipelines, focusing on data engineering workloads, while abstracting infrastructure management and operations that can be both time-consuming and complex.
With the integration, business analysts can ingest sensor data through IoT Hub, pull Cloudera-processed data into Microsoft SQL Server via Polybase, and visualize insights using Microsoft Power BI for Impala. Customers are also able to host their data lakes on Azure Data Lake Store (ADLS), the hyperscale cloud storage system for data analytics, and use on-demand Azure cloud infrastructure capacity for end user self-service capability. By separating compute and storage, ADLS is able to scale resources independently for demanding customer use cases.
Future Microsoft- specific integrations will be added but even, initially, the collaboration presents a compelling offering for Azure users, Zedlewski noted.
And, according to Cloudera, because Altus is backed by the enterprise-grade Cloudera distribution, Altus reduces the risk associated with cloud migrations and workload migrations across cloud providers. Altus provides users with familiar tools and delivers shared data storage and metadata management across data pipelines.
For more information or to review the reference architecture, visit www.cloudera.com/altus.