New Cloudera Desktop GUI Simplifies Hadoop for Users

NEW YORK -- Cloudera, which touts itself as the commercial Hadoop company, has announced the release of Cloudera Desktop, a graphical user interface (GUI) for Hadoop applications. 

Cloudera announced its Cloudera Desktop at the Hadoop World conference here on Oct. 2. The initial release of Cloudera Desktop includes tools for job and cluster management.

The Apache Hadoop project develops open-source software for reliable, scalable, distributed computing. Hadoop enables applications to work with thousands of nodes and petabytes of data. It was inspired by Google's MapReduce and Google File System (GFS) papers.

Cloudera Desktop makes Hadoop easier to use and manage, said Mike Olson, CEO of Cloudera. Business analysts, developers and administrators can use the Cloudera Desktop user interface to create and submit jobs, to monitor cluster health and to browse the data stored on a Hadoop cluster. Experienced users can choose between the command-line tools provided by the open source project or the Cloudera Desktop GUI, company officials said

The Cloudera Desktop API allows Cloudera and others to build Hadoop applications with an easy-to-use graphical user interface. Future releases of the product will include additional applications. Cloudera is working with select partners to stabilize the API before publishing it for general use, Cloudera said.

“Apache Hadoop is an enormously powerful data storage and processing platform,” said Jeff Hammerbacher, vice president of products at Cloudera, in a statement. “We see lots of sophisticated applications running in production already. However, customers tell us that working with their clusters, and building applications for their business teams to use, is hard. Cloudera Desktop is aimed at solving that problem. We expect it to drive new use of Hadoop by lowering the barrier for new users, and making current users more productive.”

Cloudera Desktop runs inside a Web browser, and works on Windows, Macintosh and Linux systems. The initial release of the platform delivers four applications:

·         The file browser, for copying and browsing the data files stored on a cluster;

·         The job designer, for creating, running and saving jobs for later reuse or customization;

·         The job browser, for keeping track of job status and progress; and

·         The cluster health dashboard, for monitoring the health of a Hadoop cluster and alerting operators in case of problems.

“The open source Hadoop project has proven itself on some of the most difficult data management workloads in the world,” said Stephen O’Grady, principal analyst at RedMonk. “One of the significant barriers to broader adoption has been ease of use. With stable APIs and a traditional graphical interface for those with no exposure to Hadoop, Cloudera Desktop is aimed squarely at that opportunity.”