Hadoop Summit: Chatting with Cloudera’s VP of Product

July 11, 2011

The next in my series of videos from the Hadoop Summit features Cloudera‘s Vice President of product, Charles Zedlewski.  If you’re not familiar with Cloudera you can think of them as the Red Hat of Hadoop world.

I sat down with Charles to learn more about Cloudera, what they do and where they came from.

Some of the ground Charles covers:

  • Cloudera’s founding, what its original goals and vision were and where its founders came from.
  • (1:35) What Cloudera does for customers 1) packages Hadoop and 2) helps them run it in production environments.
  • (3:27)  What channels Cloudera leverages and where they play in the ecosystem
  • (4:11)  Charles’ thoughts on the Yahoo spin-out Hortonworks and how it might affect Cloudera.

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…


Hadoop Summit: Talking to the CEO of MapR

July 10, 2011

I’m now back from vacation and am continuing with my series of videos from the Hadoop Summit.  The one-day summit, which was very well attended, was held in Santa Clara the last week of June.  One of the two Platinum sponsors was MapR technologies.  MapR are particulaly interesting since they have taken a different approach to productizing Hadoop than the current leader Cloudera.

I got some time with their CEO and co-founder John Schroeder to learn more about MapR:

Some of the ground John covers

  • The announcements they made at the event
  • (0:16) How John got the idea to start MapR: what tech trends he was seeing and what customer problems was he learning about.
  • (1:43) How MapR’s approach to Hadoop differs from Cloudera (and Hortonworks)
  • (3:49) How the Hadoop community is growing, both with regards to Apache and the commercial entities that are developing, and the importance of this growth.

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…


Hadoop Summit: Talking to the CEO of Hortonworks

June 30, 2011

Yesterday I attended the Hadoop Summit down in Santa Clara.  The one-day event featured a morning of general sessions followed by three tracks of break outs in the afternoon.  The event also featured displays by several dozen vendors.

The big topic of the day was Hortonworks, a Yahoo! spin-out that had been announced the day before.  The company, which will officially come into being next month will be made up of 25 core Hadoop engineers from Yahoo!  Leading this new venture as its CEO is Yahoo! veteran and until this week VP of Hadoop engineering, Eric Baldeschwieler.

In the afternoon I was able to get some time with Eric and learn more about his new gig.

Some of the ground Eric covers

  • What is Hortonworks and what are its goals?
  • (0:46) Who is the technical team that will be making up the new venture
  • (1:48) Their president Rob Bearden, his open source experience and the business expertise he brings
  • (2:24) Their customers
  • (2:44) Which Hadoop engineers will remain at Yahoo!
  • (3:37) The symbiotic relationship Hortonworks and Yahoo! will have and how they will help one another

Extra-credit reading

  • Press release:  Yahoo! and Benchmark Capital to Form Hortonworks to Increase Investment in Hadoop Technology and Accelerate Innovation and Adoption
  • Hortonworks slide deck from Eric’s Hadoop summit keynote

Ubuntu, the Cloud and the Future — Neil Levine

July 27, 2010

After the cloud summit last week at OSCON, I sat down with Neil Levine of Canonical to see what was in store for Ubuntu cloud-wise (Canonical is a partner of ours in our cloud ISV program).  Neil is the VP of Canonical’s corporate services division which handles their cloud and server products.

Here’s what Neil had to say:

Some of the topics Neil tackles:

  • The next Ubuntu release “Maverick Meerkat” and its geek-a-licious launch date: 10.10.10.
  • Look for Maverick to make Eucalyptus even easier to deploy and use.
  • Data processing and data analytics is one of the key use cases in the cloud and Canonical is looking to move up the stack and provide deep integration for other apps like Hadoop and NoSQL.
  • What are some of the areas of focus for next year’s two releases i.e. 11.04 and 11.10.
  • Project ensemble: what it is and what its goals are.

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…


Cloud Camp Austin 2010

June 17, 2010

Last Thursday over a 100 cloud enthusiasts gathered for Cloud Camp Austin.  The event was held at Pervasive Software‘s headquarters and kicked off after 5PM with munchies and beer.  The event brought in folks all around Austin as well as visitors from exotic areas like upstate New York (the group had been in town for meetings).

Pre camp munchies and drinks as folks assemble.

Dell was one of the sponsors along with IBM, Microsoft, Twilio, Tropo, Redmonk and our  hosts Pervasive .  As always, the event was guided along by Mr. cloud camp, Dave Nielsen.  Being an “unconference,” after a spontaneously assembled “unpanel” who was called upon to answer questions from the audience, the crowd worked together to decide on the topics that would be discussed.

Dave Nielsen explains how this "unpanel" is going to work.

What a difference a year makes

I attended last year’s cloud camp in Austin and I don’t know if its the fact the industry has evolved so much since then or that this year there was a greater percentage of knowledgeable attendees (I suspect a little of both) but this year the topics and questions were much more sophisticated/technical.  As a results the conversations were much more meaty and focused more on “how to” rather than “how do you define.”

All in all a very cool event.

The schedule created on the fly by the attendees.

If you liked Cloud Camp and you like Hadoop, you’ll love

Speaking of camps, Dave Nielsen is taking the camp idea and applying it to the world of Big Data.  The event, which will be held in Santa Clara on June 28, is imaginatively entitled, Big Data Camp Santa Clara.  This unconference  is targeted at users of Hadoop and related technologies and is held the night before Hadoop summit 2010.  So if you’re in the area and Hadoop/Big Data are your thing, check it out.

Pau for now…