Need clarity on Cloudera's Hadoop Free Edition

[#1]

I am glad to download and use Quickstart VM. Hope cloudera's Hadoop is open source and free to use entire range of products including CM Manager/impala for production use.

I think if required customer may go later for subscription as and when required but no obligation. kindly clarify. My manager told to download hadoop from Apache site but I got same from your site as cloudera has highest committer on Apache Hadoop. Not sure if your express edition is free and can handle multi Terabyte data on 4 node CDH grid.

Regards

Anis

[#2 · Accepted solution]

https://www.cloudera.com/documentation/enterprise/5-6-x/topics/cm_ig_feature_differences.html

The main difference is that you do get a lot of features that would make management easier specifically around configuration versioning, encryption, security, etc.

There will be not technical limitation on the services between the versions.

Since you were told to get it from Apache it is worth mentioning that CDH is a package distribution that Cloudera integrates and tests. This means that you won't have to do it but it also means that you will have to go at Cloudera pace when adopting new projects or new versions (technically you can add your own as well but my view is that if you are going to be doing that anyway why not do it for all).