I primarily use CDH for data storage and regular dashboard reports.
AI & Data Engineering Lead at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Flexible and comprehensive solution
Pros and Cons
- "The most valuable feature is that I can use CDH for almost all use cases across all industries, including the financial sector, public sector, private retailers, and so on."
- "Cloudera's support is extremely bad and cannot be relied on."
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature is that I can use CDH for almost all use cases across all industries, including the financial sector, public sector, private retailers, and so on.
What needs improvement?
Cloudera's prices are too high and are not competitive with other solutions. They could also improve the Data Science Workbench and add some more features, like wizard activities.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
CDH is stable.
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What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
CDH is scalable, but it's expensive to do it.
How are customer service and support?
Cloudera's support is extremely bad and cannot be relied on.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I wouldn't recommend CDH to others because of its high cost.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate CDH as eight out of ten.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Associate Manager at a consultancy with 501-1,000 employees
Easy to install, good technical support, and with a single script we can run jobs within minutes
Pros and Cons
- "I don't see any performance issues."
- "It could be faster and more user-friendly."
What is our primary use case?
We use this solution to process data.
When using an SQL Server you have to build indexes and you need to fine-tune the data.
We import the data that is in the SQL Source.
With a single script, we are able to run the jobs within minutes, which is an advantage.
We are using the Power BI model for the business convention. The performance in Power BI will be reduced if you incorporate more calculations. Those calculations are captured in the Hadoop layer and processed.
What needs improvement?
It could be faster and more user-friendly.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using this solution for seven months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It's a stable product. I don't see any performance issues.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
This solution is scalable. We have 40 users for different projects in our organization.
We will continue to use this solution.
How are customer service and technical support?
Technical support is good.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I didn't use any other product.
How was the initial setup?
The installing is straightforward.
Our clients provide us with the access to use it directly.
Once you have been given access to the edge nodes we are able to run the scripts in the Hadoop layer.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
We do not pay for licensing because our customers forward it, so there is no need to purchase the license for the project.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend this solution.
I would rate Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop a nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Buyer's Guide
Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop
February 2025
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832,138 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Director of Data Management at a media company with 51-200 employees
It gives us improved business intelligence reporting from daily to every two hours.
Valuable Features:
Faster runtime for batch jobs.
Improvements to My Organization:
Improved Business Intelligence reporting from daily to every two hours satisfying the business stakeholders who would favour transactional systems to draft reports because it had the latest data.
The issue that arises using transactional systems with multiple version of truths across the enterprise. With faster turn-around time business stakeholders are now adopting the BI systems designed to give a cohesive view of the performance metrics important to them.
Room for Improvement:
Full Support for all Spark SQL features, support for SparkR, compatibility with Hive for DataFrame saved tables.
Cloudera CDH5.5.x does not support SparkR. SparkR, the integration of R models in API would be a great addition since this will enable fast near real-time analytical integration of R models with data feed.
The functionality in SparkSQL to save a DataFrame as a table in HIVE produces a table not compatible with HIVE. There is a workaround for this in creating the HIVE table first and then doing inserts.
Cloudera CDH5.5.x is a great product, but the adoption of additional features not currently supported will make the product even better but by no means subtract from its desirability.
Other Advice:
Do thorough research and ensure your use-cases or scale does not conflict with the system requirements and that those features that would make a difference are supported.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Data/Big Data Architect at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
We were trying AWS Impala as well, but Cloudera won as it had more functionality with HUE, Sqoop, and Solr as built-in functions. At times, heavy queries do not finish at all.
What is most valuable?
Mostly HUE, Impala, Sqoop, and Hive. The impala-shell command is number one.
How has it helped my organization?
We are working on research for genomic data looking for specific genes and variances. Even Hive was not good enough to process it correctly, only with Impala are we getting results quicker.
What needs improvement?
Sometimes the heavy queries do not finish at all. It would be good to see the progress of heavy script in the impala shell or get some way to access it.
For how long have I used the solution?
We started to use Cloudera about one-and-a-half years ago.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We are having some issues with stability and are speaking to Cloudera support.
How are customer service and technical support?
Customer Service:
It's acceptable.
Technical Support:It's acceptable.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We were trying AWS Impala as well, but Cloudera won as it had more functionality with HUE, Sqoop, and Solr as built-in functions.
How was the initial setup?
We have struggled a bit in installing and configuring Cloudera Manager on the AWS cluster. For now, it is good.
What about the implementation team?
We did the implementation only using our team and resources. It was a hard start, but an easy landing.
What other advice do I have?
Cloudera is good for mid to big company, but small ones can use AWS Impala/HUE. Go to training, or you are going to spend many hours to find short answers. The Cloudera solution is big with good documentation, but you need to know what and where to read first.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Senior Consultant & Training at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
The valuable combination of all the tools enable me to solve use cases I'm working on
Pros and Cons
- "We experienced many issues when we started working with Hadoop 3.0 in the Cloudera 6.0 version, so there are a lot of things that need to improve. I believe they are working on that."
- "We experienced many issues when we started working with Hadoop 3.0 in the Cloudera 6.0 version, so there is a lot of things that need to improve."
What is our primary use case?
I've been working on the software installation from the beginning, and we have a client for global supply change, so we get information from Telefonica's sales and distributions. Getting all that information into this system allows us to process it, get KPIs, and create outgoing information for business intelligence tools.
In the cloud provider enterprise we get all the information from the gamers, like delays, response, and information from the games. It allows us to see if gamers are having trouble, high latency or any other kind of issue. They test that and get information about the issues in order to solve them.
What is most valuable?
I like the combination of all the tools that allow me to provide solutions and enable me to solve the use cases I'm working on. You need tools or components to foresee everything, and they are all in our emails. Sometimes you try several of them, and sometimes one will work better than the other. So you have to test the tools to see what works for you.
What needs improvement?
We experienced many issues when we started working with Hadoop 3.0 in the Cloudera 6.0 version, so there are a lot of things that need to improve. I believe they are working on that.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using this solution for about a year and a half now.
How was the initial setup?
It's been quite easy to install. We only had to follow the instructions and there weren't many problems. That's important for us.
What other advice do I have?
I will rate this solution a nine out of ten because nothing is ever perfect. You will always face problems, but I'm quite happy with Cloudera.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Team Lead / Data Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
The Cloudera Manager administrator webpage simplifies the administration tasks.
What is most valuable?
The Cloudera Manager administrator webpage simplifies the administration tasks and helps to maintain a global overview of the cluster performance.
How has it helped my organization?
We are moving from an standard SQL environment (Oracle DataWarehouse) to a Big Data environment, and the Hadoop cluster will be the key of our new organization. It will allow to scale in an easy namer.
What needs improvement?
We found some difficulties when importing Hive tables from another Cluster.
I want to point the fact that we encounter many problems related to the cloud storage and how resources are managed. Our learning has been that, although it is quite simple to deploy single machines on the cloud, deploying clusters of machines is much more complex as many factors need to be considered: individual machines, connectivity across machines, storage.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've used it for three months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We found some issues but were related with the hardware provider. For the moment I have not detected any problem from the Cloudera software point of view.
How are customer service and technical support?
Technical support is really efficient.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We chose this product as it is considered a market standard and due to its wide documentation on the web. I evaluated other options but the fact that now it is becoming an standard for many companies helped me to choose this option.
How was the initial setup?
In the cloud environment where we deployed (Azure Resource Manager) there was a ready-to-deploy template which simplified a lot the initial set-up.
What about the implementation team?
We implemented with an in-house team. Our initial idea was to stop the cluster during the weekends and when there was no usage. However, we found strong difficulties and we were not able to start programmatically the whole cluster, so finally we left the cluster working all the time.
This issues were mainly related with the cloud provider and how this provider manages the resources for the cluster machines.
What was our ROI?
From our point of view it is a long-time investment. We hope to get the ROI in the following years.
What other advice do I have?
I am very comfortable with this product. The combination of Cloudera Manager administrator server, which allows the management of the Hadoop Cluster, and the Hue server, which simplifies the use make this product a current standard on the market. Perhaps it lacks a full integration of all its components.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: My company has a partnership relation with the vendor.
Senior Analyst - Strategy Analytics at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
We were able to utilize data which was untapped previously, but the documentation on Hive could be more standardized.
What is most valuable?
The features we've found most valuable are--
- Fast processing of data
- Easy to manipulate using HiveQL
How has it helped my organization?
We were able to utilize data which was untapped previously. We've got great use cases now to drive business revenue.
What needs improvement?
It needs more standardized documentation on Hive.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've used it for two and a half years.
How are customer service and technical support?
Customer Service:
It's great.
Technical Support:The level of technical support is great.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
No previous solution was used, and senior management chose to bring it in.
How was the initial setup?
I was not directly involved in deployment.
What about the implementation team?
It was done by the vendor team, who were great.
What other advice do I have?
It's good for Big Data analytics.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Architect at a marketing services firm with 501-1,000 employees
Cloudera Manager Hadoop Cluster Installation Evaluation
I decided to give Cloudera's Manager software a try, and was pleasantly surprised at how simple it becomes to deploy a substantial Hadoop cluster.
I began by creating an automated kickstart installer for RHEL 6.2 (booting off a custom isolinux image created for this purpose), with all of the required packages, so that from server power on to creating a 20+ node cluster takes less than 15 minutes. The limitation for the number of concurrent node installs is based on network and disk i/o bottlenecks on the deployment server. If you wanted to PXE boot the cluster in a production environment, you would want a bank of servers behind a load balancer, optimally.
Once the Manager is installed on the master node, you simply log into the administration webpage, and from there, add all of the hosts to deploy the cluster on. One nice discovery was that it takes advantage of regular expressions for host names or IP addresses, so you can literally create a cluster containing hundreds of nodes with a trivial amount of effort.
Once the software is deployed, you can select the roles for each of the servers. It's an incredibly painless deployment. That being said, it is not without its flaws.
One of the primary flaws is that all of the configuration and log files are in non-standard locations, and are split in non-standard ways. It's obvious from the way that the files are arranged that it simplifies programmatic deployment. It also makes it a bit harder for a human who is used to standard Hadoop deployments to figure out where everything is located.
And finally, I discovered a bug with one of the packaged software products, Oozie. One of the resource files, oozie-bundle-0.1.xsd contains an invalid regular expression on line 22. I haven't tracked down the behavior, but for some reason JDK 1.6.30 will parse that invalid regex, but JDK 1.7U2 will exit with errors. Naturally, I was running JDK 1.7U2, so it took me a little extra time to debug the problem.
Overall, I quite liked Cloudera's Manager. It's certainly one of the better cluster deployment products I've seen.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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