Cloudera
More info
- Creator
- Christophe Bisciglia, Amr Awadallah, Jeff Hammerbacher, Mike Olson
- Released
- 2008
- Type
- Software company
The company that set out to turn Hadoop into an enterprise product, then watched the market move to the cloud while it was still selling clusters.
Cloudera was founded in 2008 by alumni of Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Oracle, and Hadoop creator Doug Cutting joined in 2009. The business was classic open source: Hadoop was free, but HDFS, MapReduce and the rest of the menagerie were painful to operate, so Cloudera sold a packaged distribution, support and management tooling. Its own SQL engine, Impala, was an attempt to give Hadoop interactive queries.
Chief rival Hortonworks had been spun out of Yahoo in 2011. Once customers started parking data in S3 and running Spark on short-lived clusters, the market shrank for both, and in 2019 they merged. Two years later private equity firms KKR and Clayton, Dubilier & Rice took the combined company off the stock market.