This blog post is co-authored by Peter Darvasi, Engineer, Hortonworks.

We are excited to announce the availability of Cloudbreak for Hortonworks Data Platform on Azure Marketplace. Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) is an enterprise-ready, open source Apache Hadoop distribution. With Cloudbreak, you can easily provision, configure, and scale HDP clusters in Azure. Cloudbreak is designed for the following use cases:

• Create clusters which you can fully control and customize to best fit your workload
• Create on-demand clusters to run specific workloads, with data persisted in Azure Blob Storage or Azure Data Lake Store
• Create, manage, and scale your clusters intuitively using Cloudbreak UI, or automate with Cloudbreak Shell or API
• Automatically configure Kerberos and Apache Knox to secure your cluster

When you deploy Cloudbreak, it installs a “controller” VM which runs the Cloudbreak application. You can use the controller to launch and manage clusters. The following diagram illustrates the high-level architecture of Cloudbreak and HDP on Azure:

Cloudbreak lets you manage all your HDP clusters from a central location. You can configure your clusters with all the controls that Azure and HDP have to offer, and you can automate and repeat your deployments with:

• Infrastructure templates for specifying compute, storage, and network resources in the cloud
• Ambari blueprints for configuring Hadoop workload
• Custom scripts that you can run before or after cluster creation

In addition, Cloudbreak on Azure features the following unique capabilities:

• Easily install Cloudbreak by following a UI wizard on Azure Marketplace
• Choose among Azure Blob Storage, Azure Data Lake Store, as well as Managed Disks attached to the cluster nodes to persist your data
• Follow a simple Cloudbreak wizard to automate the creation of an Azure Active Directory Service Principal for Cloudbreak to manage your Azure resources
• Enable high availability with Azure Availability Set
• Deploy clusters in new or existing Azure VNet

Getting started

• Go to Azure Marketplace and follow the wizard to install Cloudbreak. 
• Once deployment is succeeded, retrieve the public DNS name for the Cloudbreak VM. 

• Open https with the DNS name, and you will see a browser warning. This is because by default there is no certificate set for this https site. You can still continue to your Cloudbreak web UI and follow the wizard to provision clusters. We recommend that you set up a valid certificate and disable public IP in a production environment. 

Additional resources

• For a step-by-step guide, visit Cloudbreak for Hortonworks Data Platform on Azure Marketplace documentation.
• Get your questions answered at Hortonworks Community Connection.
• To learn more about Cloudbreak and the Hortonworks Data Platform, visit www.hortonworks.com.