Cloudera Altus simplifies big data migration to the cloud

Altus promises to simplify the use of elastic infrastructure

IBM partner Cloudera showed off a new platform-as-a-service (PaaS) tool at the Strata Data conference in London this week, designed to make it easier to manage big data in the public cloud.

Initially, Cloudera Altus will help data engineers to use ‘on-demand infrastructure to hasten the creation and operation of elastic data pipelines that power sophisticated, data-driven applications.' These applications, such as ETL, are often large workloads that run for a fixed period of time; they help companies to analyse the raw data that they collect. Cloudera says that organisations can increase their flexibility and efficiency by running these pipelines on elastic infrastructure, which is available as-and-when needed.

Because it is based around data pipelines, users can submit, clone and troubleshoot pipelines with minimal attention paid to the underlying infrastructure. There are also no data siloes, so engineers can run direct reads from/writes to cloud object storage.

Cloudera's Altus Data Engineering service is designed to simplify the development and operations of elastic data pipelines, as well as lowering the risk associated with moving data to the cloud. It delivers common storage, metadata, security and management across multiple data engineering applications.

Altus can be used to deploy workloads on cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, and will eventually be available on Microsoft Azure. The initial rollout includes support for popular open source tools like Apache Spark, Apache Hive on MapReduce2 and Hive on Spark. According to IDC, 12% of the worldwide business analytics software market is now deployed on the public cloud: a figure expected to grow at a CAGR of 25% through 2020.