What is SDX (Cloudera Data Platform)

SDX just a bundling of several technologies to create a data governance/security interface for your data.  SDX stands for Shared Data eXperience.

Marketing likes to complicated technology.  SDX in simple terms is just a bunch of services they have integrated from the old “apache zoo”.  Instead of having to launch Atlas, and Ranger, now you just use CDP to navigate to different functions of those previously separate applications.  Great idea, love what they did.

SDX comprosise of the following, I’ve tried to simplify it as much as possible.

Security: Who can do what, and when can they do it.

Audit: Who can accessed what, and when did they do it.

ABAC: Attribute based access control. This allows you to tag data points with access control/masking policies.  This is a step away from the older strategies of creating a view per role, now just tag data itself and let the system figure out what users can see.

Data Lineage:  How did I get the data that is in this table I”m using?   Where did the data come from.  Data Lineage gives you this answer.

Data Catalog:  What data do I have? And what is schema of my data.

Data Migration: Lets you move data to where you need it.

Data Workload: Views what you are doing with data and helps you understand what else you can do with it.