Cloudera Inc. is continuing its push into cloud analytics with enhancements to its Altus platform as a service that provide a shared data catalog and contextual consistency to data coming from multiple sources.

The Palo Alto, California-based company said the new features make Cloudera Altus with SDX (Shared Data Experience) the best platform for applications that need to integrate many data types, such as predictive maintenance and advanced threat detection.

Cloudera is aiming to simplify the complexity of running applications with many data sources by making it possible for multiple analytics services to coexist in a unified platform that includes data engineering, data warehousing and data science services accessed through a single interface with a common catalog.

“Today, you have to consider security, schema and governance settings separately for each workload,” said Mala Ramakrishnan, senior director of product and marketing for the company’s cloud business unit. “With SDX you configure this all in one place. As long as the schema doesn’t change, you never have to reconfigure all of those settings.”

Altus eliminates the need to move data into a database, making shared data and associated data schemas and structures always available for access by whatever tool the user chooses, the company said. For analytical applications that combine data from many sources, that adds up to big time savings and a lower risk of error.

Ramakrishnan offered the example of a pizza maker that wants to correlate the toppings customers order with factors like the customer’s location and membership status in an affinity program. “To coordinate all these sources would involve a lot of [extract/transform/load procedures] using custom Spark code,” she said. “SDX can automatically have the ETL process know the schema and format of the data as it scans the logs. It knows the structure and the business context.”

SDX previously was offered as a reference architecture for shared data applications and was typically bundled with technical services. “Today we’re announcing that it’s available publicly, and we maintain it out of the box,” Ramakrishnan said.

Cloudera plans to steadily roll out new analytics features that take advantage of the Altus shared platform. The company introduced the Altus Analytic DB module in November to complement its data engineering function. A serverless data science service is currently in preview.  

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