In June Cloudera announced the general availability of CDH4 and Cloudera Manager 4. These releases are significant milestones for the Big Data community, and are also important to any organization which has yet to being their Big Data journey. CDH4 and Cloudera Manager 4 make it far easier to begin projects the right way.
Both CDH4 and Cloudera Manager 4 are full of new features. CDH4 has more security features. Cloudera Manager makes it easy to manage and audit clusters of systems doing Big Data work.
Here is a more technical restatement of that: CDH4 includes high availability for the filesystem, an ability to support multiple namespaces, HBase table and column level security, improved performance, HBase replication, and greatly improved usability and browser support for the web interface (Hue). Cloudera Manager 4 includes new abilities to manage multiple clusters and multiple versions, automation for high availability and MapReduce2, multi-namespace support, cluster-wide heatmaps, host monitoring and automated client configurations. There are many other features which will enhance capabilities for those seeking to built applications on top of CDH, which is important for the large and growing community of applications developers leveraging Hadoop for solutions.