Cloudera Interview Questions & Answers (2025)

Cloudera, Inc. is a US-based software company founded in 2008 that provides a software platform for data engineering, data warehousing, machine learning, and analytics that runs in the cloud or on-premises. Cloudera develops a Hadoop platform that integrates the most popular Apache Hadoop open-source software within one place. Cloudera will serve as the foundation for your digital transformation. Cloudera enabling you to gain actionable insight and drive immense and measurable value back to the business.

List of Some advantages of Cloudera are as follows:

• No silos
• An elastic cloud experience.
• Multi-function data analytics
• Enterprise-class security and governance
• Maximizes the business benefit of data

CDH stands for Cloudera's Distribution including Apache Hadoop which is Cloudera's 100% open-source platform distribution including Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, Apache Impala, Apache Kudu, Apache HBase, and many more.

The difference between Cloudera and Hortonworksa are as follows:

Some Cloudera’s competitors are listed below:

• HP
• IBM
• AWS
• Oracle
• MapR
• Pivotal
• Talend
• HortonWorks
• Databricks
• Teradata Corp /de/

Cloudera Impala is an Apache Impala supported by Cloudera Enterprise that provides access to data stored in CDH without requiring the Java skills required for MapReduce jobs. It is an open-source massively parallel processing (MPP) SQL query engine generally used for processing huge volumes of data that is stored in the Hadoop cluster.

Cloudera is a mature Management suite in comparison to Ambari. Cloudera is consists of advanced cluster management features and is an open-source application that comes with a vendor-lock management suite which helps in a faster installation and deployment process. Whereas Ambari allows enterprises to plan, install, and securely configure HDP making it easier to provide ongoing cluster maintenance and management, no matter the size of the cluster.

Kerberos is a computer network security protocol that uses secret-key cryptography and a trusted third party for authenticating client-server applications and verifying users' identities. It authenticates service requests between two or more trusted hosts across an untrusted network such as the internet.

A cluster template in JSON format is a reusable template. The purpose of the cluster template is for creating multiple Data Hub clusters with Cloudera Runtime settings. A Kubernetes cluster template can be defined as a blueprint of the Kubernetes cluster that contains the required configuration.

For Hadoop, Cloudera Navigator is a complete data governance solution. Cloudera Navigator offers critical capabilities including data discovery, continuous optimization, audit, lineage, metadata management, and policy enforcement.

Apache Solr fully integrated into the Cloudera platform is known as Cloudera Search. It eliminates the need to move large data sets across infrastructures to perform business tasks. It has the advantage of the flexible, scalable, and robust storage system and data processing frameworks included in the Cloudera Data Platform (CDP).

Apache Tika(TM) is a content detection and analysis framework, written in Java. It is stewarded at the Apache Software Foundation. It is also a toolkit for detecting and extracting metadata and structured text content from various documents using existing parser libraries.

For Apache Hadoop, Avro is an open-source project that provides data serialization and data exchange services that facilitates the exchange of big data between programs written in any language.

Yes! Cloudera Manager Supports an API.

CDH libraries located in the directories from the following list.

• /usr/lib/hadoop
• /usr/lib/hadoop-hdfs
• /usr/lib/hadoop-mapreduce
• /usr/lib/hadoop-yarn
• + 3rd party libraries are located in lib subdirectories