Running Hadoop outside the firewall is set to become much easier for customers of Cloudera Inc. thanks to a new iteration of its management automation framework that debuted this week. The release brings a hands-off provisioning feature that can spin up the hardware resources needed for a particular query and deallocate the infrastructure after the operation is complete with minimal manual intervention.

It’s similar to the functionality that Qubole Inc. has implemented in its rivaling Hadoop automation service, which attracted $30 million from investors yesterday. Like Cloudera, the startup aims to reduce the amount of administrative work involved in managing off-premise deployments of the data crunching framework, and supports the same three major hosting platforms. Both are actively working to expand the choice of providers available for their customers to try and push ahead in the race, while also continuously adding more options on the analytics front.

Cloudera Director 2.0 introduces integration with the speedy Spark processing engine and Hive, which makes it possible to mine for business intelligence leveraging traditional structured query syntax. Users can either work with the data warehouse directly or bring a third party analytics tool into the mix to serve as the frontend interface. The interoperability is facilitated by support for the RecordService access layer added in conjunction, which the Hadoop distributor specifically developed to support the heavy multi-tenant access that large enterprise analyst teams require.

The software doubles as a security enforcement mechanism, giving organizations the ability to regulate who can modify what piece of information in their analytics clusters down to every individual row. Cloudera Director 2.0 complements the functionality with the inclusion of the Kerberos authentication protocol and data protection capabilities meant to ensure deployments are not only safe from unauthorized access but outages as well. The main highlight on that front is a new automated high-availability mode that the company says allows for quick recovery from node failures.

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