Cloudera announces tighter security measures for Hadoop

Cloud securityCloudera has announced a new open source project that aims to use real-time analytical applications in Hadoop and an open source security layer for unified access control enforcement.

Kudu, an in-memory store for Hadoop, aims to give developers more choice and stop them from having their options limited. Currently developers must choose between fast analytics with HDFS or updating data with HBase. Combining the two, according to Cloudera, can be potentially fatal for any developers that try, since the systems are both highly complex.

Cloudera says Kudu eliminates the complexities involved in processes like time series analysis, machine data analytics and online reporting. It does this by supporting high-performance sequential and random reads and writes, enabling fast analytics on changing data.

Cloudera co-authored Kudu with Intel, which helped it make better use of in-memory hardware and Intel’s 3D XPoint technology. Other contributors included Xiaomi, AtScale, Splice Machine and Zoomdata.

“Our infrastructure team has been working with Cloudera to develop Kudu, taking advantage of its unique ability to support columnar scans and fast inserts and updates to continue to expand our Hadoop ecosystem footprint,” Baoqiu Cui, chief architect at smartphone developer Xiaomi, told CIO magazine. “Using Kudu, alongside interactive SQL tools like Impala, has allowed us to build a next-generation data analytics platform for real-time analytics and online reporting.”

Meanwhile a new core security for Hadoop has been launched. RecordService aims to provide unified access control enforcement for Hadoop by enforcing role based access controls. It acts as a new layer that sits between Hadoop’s storage and computing engines and aims to consistently enforce the role-based access controls defined by Sentry. RecordService also provides dynamic data masking across Hadoop, protecting sensitive data as it is accessed.

“Security is a critical part of Hadoop, but for it to evolve the security needs to become universal across the platform. With RecordService, the Hadoop community fulfils the vision of unified fine-grained access controls for every Hadoop access path,” said Mike Olson, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Cloudera.