Cloudera Announces Formation of Cloudera Labs

PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct. 30 — Cloudera, the leader in enterprise analytic data management powered by Apache Hadoop, announced the formation of Cloudera Labs, a virtual center for fostering innovations in incubation within Cloudera’s engineering R&D, and fast-tracking promising open source initiatives on the leading edge of adoption. The goal of Cloudera Labs is to bring more use cases, productivity, and value to developers by seeking and exploring new solutions to their problems through the development of future standard technologies that will power the Hadoop ecosystem.

“Great ideas start with a spark of innovation,” said Charles Zedlewski, vice president, Products at Cloudera. “To realize their true potential, projects often benefit from a collaborative approach where they can be explored and developed more deeply – and looked at from every angle. As our roots are deeply embedded in the open source community and driving open standards, the desire to foster, nurture, collaborate, and bring to market solutions that our customers require runs deep. We’ve formed Cloudera Labs to do that at an accelerated rate.”

Cloudera Labs initiatives may extend to include integration between CDH and new ecosystem projects as well as features, tools, and connectors. Efforts in this area are evident by the company’s engineering work already with Apache Parquet (incubating), Apache DataFu (incubating), and Apache Spark.

One of the most promising projects under way across the Hadoop ecosystem is Apache Kafka, a highly-scalable, fault-tolerant publish-subscribe messaging system. Kafka, founded and in production at LinkedIn, can broker terabytes of data from thousands of users across a single cluster serving as the backbone for any large organization. Kafka is already well integrated with systems like Spark Streaming. As a Labs initiative, Cloudera will explore Kafka further in support of applications that would immediately benefit from such elasticity, scale, and performance using a distributed messaging system.