The Cloudera Development Kit, or CDK for short, is a set of libraries, tools, examples, and documentation focused on making it easier to build systems on top of the Hadoop ecosystem.

The goals of the CDK are:

• Codify expert patterns and practices for building data-oriented systems and applications.
• Let developers focus on business logic, not plumbing or infrastructure.
• Provide smart defaults for platform choices.
• Support piecemeal adoption via loosely-coupled modules.

Eric Sammer recorded a webinar in which he talks about the goals of the CDK.

This project is organized into modules. Modules may be independent or have dependencies on other modules within the CDK. When possible, dependencies on external projects are minimized.

The following modules currently exist.

The data module provides logical abstractions on top of storage subsystems (e.g. HDFS) that let users think and operate in terms of records, datasets, and dataset repositories. If you're looking to read or write records directly to/from a storage system, the data module is for you.

The tools module provides command-line tools and APIs for performing common tasks with the CDK.

The cdk-flume-avro-event-serializer module is a Flume extension that allows the HDFS sink to write Avro records.

The cdk-flume-log4jappender module is a Log4j appender for writing Avro records to Flume.

The CDK logging example has a usage example for these modules.

Example code demonstrating how to use the CDK can be found in the separate GitHub repository at https://github.com/cloudera/cdk-examples

The CDK is provided under the Apache Software License 2.0. See the file LICENSE.txt for more information.