Qubell, provider of an autonomic application management platform for cloud applications, today announced the availability of Qubell for Hadoop Developers. The new solution enables Hadoop developers to add dynamic, cloud-based test environments on-demand for new or existing big data analytics projects. As companies, particularly in retail, financial services and high-tech industries invest in big data analytics initiatives, Qubell for Hadoop Developers offers the fastest, easiest way to get started with big data analytics projects, and create, test and operate new software that drives greater business insight and increases revenue streams.

“Coordinating big data analytics with effective test creation and deployment is becoming a key focus increasingly for Global organizations as they seek to leverage the benefits of Hadoop and create visibility for the massive amount of data that’s been collected,” said Melinda Ballou, Program Director for IDC’s Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Executive Strategies service. “Too many companies are still at immature levels of quality and configuration management for production environments leveraging big data analytics and need to transition quickly to managed support to help drive key business benefits of analytics.”

Testing big data typically presents two major challenges for organizations because of 1) the lack of in-house testing infrastructure required to execute big data projects, and 2) the lack of skills in configuring, testing and managing analytics tools and environments. Because of the associated costs and time involved, testing big data applications is most commonly done in production by fencing off part of the production system for the developers, but this approach presents two problems for organizations. First, changes made by developers can oftentimes wreak havoc to production systems and second, innovation is stifled when developers are severely restricted in what they can actually do in a fenced-off environment.

Qubell for Hadoop Developers
Qubell for Hadoop Developers combines the power of an on-demand cloud infrastructure with fully provisioned applications stacks configured with required datasets, libraries and tools. The result is a self-service solution that enables analytics groups to do something they were never able to do before: provide a push-button experience for data scientists to get test clusters on-demand, and tear them down when no longer needed.

Unlike other solutions that are either too limiting by the choice of analytics tools or too generic to be suitable for big data applications, Qubell for Hadoop Developers is built on an open platform and enables users to add new components of the analytics stack and mix and match traditional and big data analytics technologies, so they can be managed as one unified system. The solution combines the convenience of pre-loaded and pre-configured essential Hadoop-related tools, optimized to run on AWS, with the flexibility to expand the system by adding more application components, customizing the workflows or moving to a multi-cloud environment. The result is a dramatically lower barrier of entry without risks or lock-in.

Qubell for Hadoop Developers is a pay-per-use solution that reduces the need for specialized deployment and configuration expertise, eliminates the limitations of fixed IT infrastructure and provides cost-efficient use of the computational resources for bursty activities associated with testing. Qubell for Hadoop Developers is built on top of Qubell’s autonomic application delivery and management platform, which supports self-service test environments, continuous delivery, continuous live updates and visibility of configuration changes.

“Agility is a critical element of our success. Qubell enables us to test and deploy new features continuously, even for complex big data driven applications,” said Kira Makagon, EVP of Innovation at RingCentral, a leading provider of cloud business phone systems.

The Power of Qubell for Analytics
Qubell for Hadoop Developers includes Cloudera’s open Hadoop platform CDH, supported with popular open-source tools that include Cloudera Manager, Pig, Hive, MapReduce, Hue, Hbase, HDFS, Impala, Flume and Solr that lessen the learning curve and allow development and testing to begin immediately. Additionally, users may import components from MySQL, Oracle Database, Cassandra, Vertica, Tableau and more from the Qubell Bazaar on GitHub with a single click and start using it right away with existing analytics systems.

With Qubell for Hadoop Developers, users gain the following features and benefits:
● Developer Sandboxes: enable users to spin up and dispose of small, private Hadoop environments that are pre-loaded with code from a personal branch, test datasets and all the necessary tools in just one click.
● Certified Test Environments: users create certified test environments on-demand for regression, integration and other types of testing, that are pre-loaded with the right datasets, connected with the right test infrastructure and integrated with CI tools.
● Continuous Upgrades: users can configure their environments to push new versions of the jobs, workflows, queries and data as soon as they become available, on schedule or on request.
● Collaborative Development: allows users to share environments with colleagues, track changes in multiple environments of interest and reuse configurations between teammates.

“With Qubell for Hadoop developers, we are lowering the barriers to leveraging Hadoop and related tools and bringing the best practices of continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous upgrades to the world of big data,” said Victoria Livschitz, CEO of Qubell. “On the other hand, we know that big data projects don’t exist in isolation and our customers need to mix, match and integrate big data infrastructure with all the other enterprise and web technology. Having a unified autonomic application management platform that can handle all types of applications, including Hadoop, is a big deal.”

Get Started Quickly
Qubell offers a family of flexible service plans ranging from Qubell Express, to start for free with the option to upgrade to Qubell Business from $799/month and its custom offering Qubell Enterprise. Qubell Express is a comprehensive base product that makes it easy for users to quickly take advantage of the power of autonomic application management with no risk and no lock-in. Users can get started on AWS and then as they increase their usage, easily move to private or hybrid clouds. Users can sign-up online and start using it within minutes by going to Qubell’s Sign-Up.