Cloudera is a company that was founded in 2008 by ex-employees of Google, Yahoo!, Oracle, and Facebook. It was an early adopter of open source technologies like Apache Hadoop when it was still fresh from the oven; as a matter of a fact, the author of Hadoop itself joined the company shortly thereafter. Today, Cloudera sells licenses for a broad array of open source products, mostly from the Apache Software Foundation, and also provides consulting services.

In this recipe, we will look at a free virtual image from Cloudera that we can use to learn how to use the newest technologies supported by the company.