Cloudera Docs

Apache Kudu overview

Apache Kudu is a columnar storage manager developed for the Hadoop platform. Kudu shares the common technical properties of Hadoop ecosystem applications: It runs on commodity hardware, is horizontally scalable, and supports highly available operation.

Apache Kudu is a top-level project in the Apache Software Foundation.

Kudu's benefits include:

  • Fast processing of OLAP workloads.
  • Integration with MapReduce, Spark, Flume, and other Hadoop ecosystem components.
  • Tight integration with Apache Impala, making it a good, mutable alternative to using HDFS with Apache Parquet.
  • Strong but flexible consistency model, allowing you to choose consistency requirements on a per-request basis, including the option for strict serialized consistency.
  • Strong performance for running sequential and random workloads simultaneously.
  • Easy administration and management through Cloudera Manager.
  • High availability. Tablet Servers and Master use the Raft consensus algorithm, which ensures availability as long as more replicas are available than unavailable. Reads can be serviced by read-only follower tablets, even in the event of a leader tablet failure.
  • Structured data model.
By combining all of these properties, Kudu targets support applications that are difficult or impossible to implement on currently available Hadoop storage technologies. Applications for which Kudu is a viable solution include:
  • Reporting applications where new data must be immediately available for end users
  • Time-series applications that must support queries across large amounts of historic data while simultaneously returning granular queries about an individual entity
  • Applications that use predictive models to make real-time decisions, with periodic refreshes of the predictive model based on all historical data