Cloudera announces new updates to its data platform at Evolve25 in New York, highlighting the enhancements to the Cloudera Iceberg Rest catalog and the Cloudera Lakehouse Optimizer.
The latest updates focus on supporting an open, unified data lakehouse environment by addressing corporate challenges such as complex data architectures, different platforms and the need for consistent governance across multiple environments.
These capabilities are intended to enable secure, secure data access, improved performance and reduced costs for organizations looking to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics initiatives.
Iceberg REST catalog extension
Cloudera integrates the Iceberg Rest catalog into the platform, allowing third-party engines to directly access data managed by Cloudera, without the need to copy or move.
This means that zero copy data sharing will be available to organizations. This helps reduce costs, reduce security risks, and maintain consistent access policies and metadata intelligence through cloud, data centers and edge deployments.
Cloudera holds the position as the only vendor in the market that offers unified security, governance, and interoperability throughout the entire data lifecycle.
This ranges from real-time data ingestion to large-scale processing and ultimately AI and business intelligence consumption.
By extending Apache Iceberg with REST-based access, the company is able to build more future data strategies, achieve better control and visibility, and meet compliance requirements more effectively.
Following these enhancements, all Cloudera customers using Iceberg will benefit from a variety of analytics and interoperability with AI engines, including Snowflake, Databricks, AWS Athena, AWS EMR, and Salesforce.
This offering promises complete acid compliance and unified access policy enforcement, including fine-tuned access control, data lineage, and auditing, even when using third-party tools via Cloudera's Shared Data Experience (SDX).
Additionally, new features grant open metadata access. This allows data assets to be discovered without locking customers into their own catalog.
This change is expected to speed up AI development and business intelligence activities by providing a consistent, accessible source of data truth. Customers have reported significant cost savings, with some people showing that data storage costs have been reduced by up to 79%, increasing visibility across business units. As an example, global satellite service providers have achieved these savings while strengthening their AI data pipeline.
Lake House Optimizer Automation
Cloudera Lakehouse Optimizer is introduced as a service that provides automated optimization and table maintenance for Apache Iceberg tables.
The company claims this goes beyond basic housekeeping tasks by supporting actions such as manifest rewriting and file deletion locations. This is important to maintain efficient query performance and storage usage over time.
This Optimiser automation is designed to reduce or eliminate manual data management and operational overhead, focusing on analytics activities that free up customers and create value.
It has enterprise-grade observability through a user interface that allows granular policy settings and adjustments at both the table and catalog levels. The solution is open and compatible with Iceberg-compliant engines across the public cloud, with the ability to run on-premises in future releases.
The internal Cloudera benchmark reduces potential query performance improvements and storage costs by 36% after implementing the Lakehouse Optimizer.
“Cloudera is a pioneer in the big data industry and a leading platform provider that continues to invest in preparing for the Apache Iceberg Open Table Format Enterprise,” said Leo Brunnick, Cloudera's Chief Product Officer.
“With today's news, we continue to provide promises of flexibility, scalability and uncompromising insights. Where we need it most. That commitment is why the world's largest organization relies on Cloudera to bring AI to data.”
Both the Iceberg REST catalog and Cloudera data sharing capabilities with Cloudera Lakehouse Optimizer are now available to customers looking for more flexibility and control over their data architecture.
