Advantages of Separating Compute and Data Resources

Separating compute and data resources in a Virtual Private Cluster has important advantages for many workloads.

Architectures that separate compute resources from data resources can provide many advantages for a CDP deployment:

  • More options for deploying computational and storage resources
    • You can selectively deploy resources using on-premise servers, containers, virtual machines, or cloud resources that are tailored for the workload. When you configure a Compute cluster, you can provision hardware that is more appropriate for computational workloads while the Base cluster can use hardware that emphasizes storage capacity. Cloudera recommends that each cluster use similar hardware.
    • Software resources can be optimized to best use computational and storage resources.
  • Ephemeral clusters

    When deploying clusters on cloud infrastructure, having separate clusters for compute and storage allows you to temporarily shut down the compute clusters and avoid unnecessary expense -- while still leaving the data available to other applications.

  • Workload Isolation
    • Compute clusters can help to resolve resource conflicts among users accessing the cluster. Longer running or resource intensive workloads can be isolated to run in dedicated compute clusters that do not interfere with other workloads.
    • Resources can be grouped into clusters that allow IT to allocate costs to the teams that use the resources.