Announcing: Cloudera Enterprise 5.5

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Cloudera Enterprise 5.5 is now generally available (comprising CDH 5.5, Cloudera Manager 5.5, and Cloudera Navigator 2.4).

Cloudera is excited to bring you news of Cloudera Enterprise 5.5 (Release Notes). Our persistent emphasis on quality is especially pronounced in this release, with more than 500 issues identified and triaged during its development.

Here are some of the highlights (see the Release Notes for full lists of features and fixes):

Security

• Column-level security is now provided in Impala and Apache Hive (via Apache Sentry [incubating]).

• In Cloudera Manager-managed clusters, cleartext passwords can now be redacted from configuration files.

• Cloudera Manager includes a new wizard for setting up HDFS encryption, KMS, and Navigator Key Trustee.

• In Cloudera Navigator Encrypt, dmcrypt+loopfile replaces eCryptfs (deprecated) for file encryption.

• LDAP/AD auth is now supported for Apache Solr clients.

• Apache HBase replication is now encrypted.

Performance, Scale, and Operations

• HDFS includes many scalability enhancements, including data-block “flow control” to help optimize DataNode configuration.

• Navigator Encrypt now supports auto-failover to a secondary Key Trustee Server.

• Cloudera Manager now offers a new aggregate UI that provides a single, read-only health dashboard across Cloudera Manager instances.

• HUE HA can now be set up via Cloudera Manager.

• Performance is significantly improved when replicating millions of files, partitions, and petabytes of data with Cloudera Manager Backup and Disaster Recovery.

• Improved parcel management: ability to retry upgrade on failure; selective service restart when updating patch parcels.  

• Kafka now supports rolling restarts.

Data Management and Governance

• Expanded coverage in Cloudera Navigator:

• Extended Apache Hive lineage attributes

• Hive-on-Spark lineage

• HUE audits

• Extended Cloudera Manager audits

• Platform enhancements:

• The new Cloudera Navigator SDK opens up lineage and metadata capabilities for the entire ecosystem.

• Improved self-service data discovery dashboard provides visibility into metadata, schema, and full drill-down into entities.

• Navigator can now publish audit events to Apache Kafka.

• Data stewardship capabilities:

• Automated policy workflows for retention and archiving.

SQL Support & Usability

• Impala now supports querying nested data on Apache Parquet (with support for other file formats like Apache Avro on the roadmap).

• Impala’s robustness and memory efficiency have been improved.

• Spark SQL and the DataFrames API are now supported.

• The majority of Spark MLlib is now supported.

New or Updated Open Source Components

• Apache Spark 1.5 (including Spark SQL, DataFrames API, and MLlib per above)

• Apache Flume 1.6

• Apache Sqoop 1.4.6

• Apache Sentry 1.5.1

• HUE 3.9

• Impala 2.3

New or Updated Platform Support

• RHEL 7

• MariaDB

• Amazon S3 storage for Apache Spark and Apache Hive

Over the next few weeks, we'll publish blog posts that cover some of these features in detail. In the meantime:

• Download Cloudera Enterprise 5.5 or the 5.5 VM

• Explore documentation
   
  

As always, we value your feedback; please provide any comments and suggestions through our community forums. You can also file bugs via issues.cloudera.org.