If you haven’t already started making plans for the CDH 6 End of Support Life (EOSL) coming up in March 2022, now is the time to do so to make sure that you’re fully prepared.
In this article, we’ll be covering what the CDH 6 EOSL means for you, what your options are, and why a migration to a new platform might be the best approach.
This article is primarily aimed at CDH 6 platform owners or anyone responsible for their company’s big data strategy and current CDH 6 platforms.Â
What Does Cloudera CDH 6 End of Life Support Mean?
Cloudera CDH 6 End of Life Support refers to the end of Cloudera’s obligation to support the CDH 6 release, even for customers who have support contracts with Cloudera. This is planned for March 2022, and includes (but is not limited to) any form of support or maintenance investigation from Cloudera via Cloudera’s support portal and any further patch fixes or software releases for CDH 6.
What Are Your Options as a Cloudera Customer?
This announcement forces customers to confront an EoS decision. If a customer chooses to stay with Cloudera, they must either upgrade, move to a new cloud offering, request extended support, or run unsupported. Let’s explore these options in more detail.
Upgrade
CDP Private Cloud is the next version of the Cloudera Platform for on-premises clusters. This distribution is the merger of two previous distributions of Hadoop; Cloudera and Hortonworks. The company had to make the decision to deprecate services to consolidate the platform for go forward potential. This has resulted in a number of significant changes. In working with our customers, we’re keenly aware of the challenges and the amount of work involved.Â
CDP Cloud
Cloudera’s preferred option for customers is to migrate them to CDP Cloud. This is Cloudera’s product as a SaaS service. Again, due to the large number of changes in the go forward platform, customers are faced with having to make tough decisions and expend a large amount of resources to move to this offering.
Extended Support
Given the amount of work involved in the previous options, customers may request extended support of CDH 6. This has a big price tag and only kicks the can down the road. Customers should only explore this option if they have a clear timeline for implementing the previous options or are in the process of migrating to a new technology platform.
Unsupported
If you do not get Cloudera extended support, and are unable to finish a migration before the EOSL date, you are looking at continuing to use your CDH 6 platform unsupported. While unsupported, any major production issue will fall solely on your CDH platform administration team to solve. You will not be able to raise a Cloudera support case for a CDH 6 platform following the EOSL date to have Cloudera assist in resolving issues, even in Production environments. If this is your only option, please check out our comprehensive blog on the topic that covers potential challenges you may face.
What’s the Best Option?
The ideal response to the upcoming CDH 6 EOSL is to migrate to a new platform before it comes into effect. This way you avoid having to pay for extended CDH 6 support, or being in a situation where you do not have vendor support from Cloudera for your CDH 6 platform. There are several possibilities for which platform you may want to migrate to. Some vendors such as Snowflake and AWS will cover the cost of POCs up to a certain amount, making the decision to begin one easier.
While each business is different, we’ve found that our customers have had the most success migrating to the Snowflake Data Cloud. With that being said, we put together a number of detailed (and free) migration guides to help.
Hadoop to Snowflake Migration Guide
How phData Can Help
With the End of Support Life date for CDH 6 rapidly approaching at the end of March 2022, it’s best to consider what the future of your big data platform will look like, and take steps to make it a reality, as soon as possible. phData can help with this!Â
We can evaluate your platform as it is today and work on your behalf with our technology partners at AWS, Cloudera, Databricks, and Snowflake to determine what the best migration strategy is for you to help get you moving fast.
With our years of experience managing multiple CDH 6 platforms, we can also help you maintain your current CDH 6 platform past the EOSL date as we work together on your migration.
FAQs
No, you do not need to leverage another platform along with Snowflake. Instead, consider migrating your Spark applications over to Snowpark! Learn more about Snowpark and what it looks like from the perspective of a Spark developer with this Spark Developer’s Guide to Snowpark. phData’s Data Engineering services can help you get your existing Spark applications migrated over to Snowpark as well.
If you are migrating to Snowflake, consider using Snowpark for this as well! We have an article on Machine Learning on Snowflake: Clustering Data with Snowpark that may help you figure out if your ML applications can be migrated to Snowpark. If you are open to vetting other frameworks for your Machine Learning applications, consider looking at our write-up on What Are Machine Learning Frameworks and How to Pick the Best One to help you evaluate the top ML frameworks out there.
