Category Archives: blog

Going Beyond Cluster Monitoring with Apache Ambari and Driven

More organizations are successfully moving their Hadoop big data applications to production and leveraging the power of their big data. A recent study by DNV GL – Business Assurance and research institute GFK Eurisko concluded that some organizations are starting to see results in the areas of greater efficiency, improved decision making, and more effective […]

Cloudera Manager And The Truth About Monitoring Applications vs. The Cluster

Enterprises that are using big data applications to successfully accelerate their growth will quickly find themselves leaning on their solution more than they ever imagined. For managers and practitioners in the DevOps department, this business-wide reliance on big data can be both a blessing and a curse. In a business environment where 0% downtime is […]

Say Hello to Apache Flink 1.0

We are very happy to see that today the Apache Flink community reached an important milestone in the life of their project: The 1.0 release. Apache Flink reaching 1.0 was a long and complicated process, so a considerable achievement, especially for a project that aims to cover all aspects of data processing: Streaming, Batch, SQL, […]

Hadoop Troubleshooting: Application Performance Made Simpler

The truth is that no application will maintain perfect performance in its lifetime. We all know application performance can be influenced by a number of environmental variables and by other applications behavior. Optimizing performance is something that should (but not always does) happen during the development cycle but needs to continue throughout the lifetime of […]

7 Tactics to Ensure Hadoop Operational Excellence

In our last post, we talked about the possible options for organizing to achieve operational excellence on Hadoop and the pro’s and con’s of each model. A couple of key points that surfaced during our conversations with our customers who have successful production deployments were: 1) be conscious of the fact that data applications are […]

Hadoop Production Readiness – And How You Should Organize For It!

First off, there is no right answer to how to organize to ensure Hadoop production readiness – Only the right answer for you (sorry). The key is to understand the implications, potential limitations and when to rethink how you are organized. Hadoop, like any other environment, is not static. It will change, mature and grow […]

Got Hadoop Operations Challenges? A Lack of Application Performance Visibility is the Cause!

Ensuring reliable application performance in a production Hadoop environment is really hard. We feel your pain and after speaking with dozens of organizations with mature implementations, some common themes emerge about the nature of these environments: Multiple business teams are developing applications using the technology that best suites their use case and/or skill set As a result, […]

6 “A-ha Moments” on the Journey to Hadoop Production Readiness

Hadoop is hard and if you’ve ever tried to code in MapReduce or manage a Hadoop cluster running production jobs, you know what I mean. Apache Spark has promise and simplifies some of Hadoop’s complexities but also brings its own challenges. The good news is regardless of technology, there are more and more successful Big […]

3 Factors Helped Ensure Success of HomeAway’s Big Data Initiative

If you have read any of the industry reports lately, you’ll see mixed reviews about the success of Big Data initiatives. With any new technology, there is always a period where leading organizations try (and fail) to implement it. It’s not surprising that some organizations have struggled while others find success. That’s how we find […]

Mitigating 5 Performance Risks of Managing Hadoop as a Shared Service

Let’s face it; ensuring reliable application performance in a Hadoop shared services environment is hard. With more organizations moving this direction, we’ve developed a clear understanding of some of the common challenges almost every organization has faced along the way and we want to share those with you. Hopefully, armed with this information you can anticipate issues […]