New Features and Changes in Cloudera Altus Director

By default, Altus Director 6.3 installs Cloudera Manager 6.3 and CDH 6.3.

Altus Director 6.3 may be run either on OpenJDK 11 or Java 8.

By default, Altus Director 6.3 installs Java 8 for use by Cloudera Manager 6.3 and CDH 6.3. However, these new releases of Cloudera Manager and CDH also run under OpenJDK 11, and so Altus Director may be configured to instead install OpenJDK 11 for them from the package of your choice.

Definitions for the eu-north-1 (Stockholm) and ap-east-1 (Hong Kong) regions have been added to the AWS plugin that ships with Altus Director 6.3.0.

Definitions for the STANDARD_D2S_V3 and STANDARD_D4S_V3 VM types have been added to the Azure plugin that ships with Altus Director 6.3.0.

The Google Cloud Platform plugin that ships with Altus Director 6.3.0 contains several new features and improvements.

• Shared VPCs are now supported, meaning that Altus Director can work with networks that are shared from another project.
• External IP addresses for instances are now optional.
• Up to eight local SSDs can now be associated with an instance.
• Automatically generated instance names are now shorter, to help to avoid problems with setting up server TLS certificates.

Altus Director supports the use of local mirrors for the repositories that host installation packages for Cloudera Manager and parcels for CDH.

Previously, Altus Director only supported only the expected layout for Cloudera Manager mirror repositories.

By default, Altus Director 6.2 installs Cloudera Manager 6.2 and CDH 6.2.

Altus Director 6.2 installs Java 8 with Cloudera Manager 6.2 and the CDH 6.2 instances.

You can use Altus Director 6.2 to install Cloudera Manager and CDH 5.7.x or later 5.x versions if you specify the product version and parcel repositories in the Altus Director configuration file.

When Altus Director 6.2 installs Cloudera Manager 5.7.x or a later 5.x version, Altus Director 6.2 installs Java 7 with Cloudera Manager and the CDH instances by default. You can configure the Java version that Altus Director 6.2 installs with Cloudera Manager 5.7.x or a later 5.x version. For more information about configuring the Java version for Cloudera Manager and CDH clusters, see Deploying Java on Cluster Instances.

Director supports automatic instance groups that use instances in an EC2 Auto Scaling Group (ASG) or Azure Virtual Machine Scale Set (VMSS). Automatic instance groups typically launch faster and more reliably, and in some cases support new features not available in regular instances.

Director does not yet support changing the size of an ASG or VMSS in the cloud provider. You must continue to use Director's grow/shrink cluster updates if you need to change the size of an automatic instance group.

For more information about automatic instance groups, see Using Automatic Instance Groups.

You can use an Azure Database for MySQL instance for the Altus Director database and for the Cloudera Manager database and CDH component databases.

For more information about using Azure Database for MySQL, see Setting up Azure Database for MySQL.

Azure’s Fsv2-series, Dsv3-series and Esv3-series VM sizes are now supported.

Cloudera Director can now provision Azure instances behind an HTTP proxy server.

Cloudera Altus Director has expanded how it monitors Cloudera Manager configurations and synchronizes them with Altus Director’s internal state. When Altus Director synchronizes with Cloudera Manager, the configuration values for Cloudera Manager, management services, and roles are copied back into the deployment template. The refreshed values are included in any subsequent export of the deployment. Sensitive values are stored as “REDACTED” so they are not exposed via the UI or in the exported configuration.

In addition to monitoring Cloudera Manager configurations, Altus Director monitors Cloudera Manager for license changes and reflects those as well. Users who need to update their existing Cloudera Manager license can do so without interruption, and users can now add usage-based billing on clusters that were initially set up with a trial license and later migrated to a full license.