[..] *Cloudera – Redhat of Cloud Computing? [..]
A group of Silicon Valley executives, Amr Awadallah 
(formerly with
Yahoo), Christophe Bisciglia (ex-Googler), Jeff Hammerbacher (formerly from
Facebook) and Mike Olson (an entrepreneur), have teamed up to launch CloudEra. There is not much
info available at this point except the fact that the company will offer support
for Apache Hadoop, a
scalable, efficient and reliable platform that implements Mapreduce and helps
develop applications that can process petabytes of data. Their website also
claims to support projects related to Hadoop and I suspect they will offer
support to the high level language Pig, Zookeeper and other Hadoop related projects. In the absence of
any information from them, it is just speculation at this time. I tried to
contact the founding team at Cloudera and Christophe Bisciglia has promised to
talk to me and other bloggers pretty soon.
Cloudera is planning to do for Cloud Computing what Redhat did for Linux more than a decade back. Redhat took the Open Source Linux operating system, repackaged it and offered it along with paid technical support. They were essentially making money out of a free software (as in beer) by using what was a new and innovative business model at that time. Enterprises were skeptical about Linux till then and Redhat’s model helped in a faster adoption of Linux by the enterprises. Enterprise adoption of Cloud Computing is in the same situation where Linux was more than a decade ago.
In today’s economy, with a possibility of recession in sight, enterprises can benefit a lot by using cloud computing. But concerns like security, privacy and regulatory issues are still keeping the enterprises from making the jump. However, enterprises can scale and operate efficiently using cloud like architecture within their own datacenters. Such a move will also cut down the costs and help enterprises save money in this downward spiraling economy. Using an open source platform like Hadoop, enterprises can tap commodity hardware to achieve a scale like Google or Yahoo for their data processing needs. The biggest reason for the reluctance of enterprises to use Open Source software like Hadoop is the lack of technical support. I think Cloudera is planning to fill this gap. From a cloud computing evangelist perspective, this is a good thing to happen. Even if the enterprises don’t move their data into the clouds immediately, they can still achieve cloud like scale, reliability, cost savings, etc. by using Hadoop kind of platforms. The will help shrink the trust gap existing between the enterprise customers and cloud computing philosophy making the enterprise cloud adoption a realistic possibility in the future.
Without any specific information from the Cloudera team, we can only speculate on the impact of their business on enterprise cloud computing. In this era of fear mongering unleashed by companies whose business interests are threatened by the cloud computing, companies like Cloudera becomes important to convince the enterprise customers about the advantages of moving to the Clouds.
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