Cloudera to Azure Migration Center¶

The definitive resource for migrating from Cloudera CDH/CDP to Microsoft Azure, Databricks, and CSA-in-a-Box.

Who this is for¶

This migration center serves CDOs, data platform architects, data engineers, Hadoop administrators, and analytics leaders who are evaluating or executing a migration from Cloudera CDH 6.x, CDP Private Cloud, or CDP Public Cloud to Azure-native services. Whether you are responding to CDH end-of-life, escalating CDP renewal costs, or a strategic pivot toward cloud-native analytics, these resources provide the evidence, patterns, and step-by-step guidance to execute confidently.

Quick-start decision matrix¶

Strategic resources¶

These documents provide the business case, cost analysis, and strategic framing for decision-makers.

Technical references¶

Component migration guides¶

Domain-specific deep dives covering the components that require specialized migration approaches beyond the core playbook.

Tutorials¶

Hands-on, step-by-step walkthroughs for common migration scenarios.

Best practices & planning¶

How CSA-in-a-Box fits¶

CSA-in-a-Box is the core migration destination -- an Azure-native reference implementation providing Data Mesh, Data Fabric, and Data Lakehouse capabilities. For Cloudera migrations specifically, it provides:

• ADLS Gen2 + OneLake replacing HDFS with medallion architecture (bronze/silver/gold)
• Databricks + dbt replacing Hive, Spark on YARN, and Impala
• Azure Data Factory replacing Oozie, Sqoop, NiFi, and Flume
• Event Hubs replacing Kafka with wire-protocol compatibility
• Purview + Unity Catalog replacing Ranger and Atlas
• Azure Monitor replacing Cloudera Manager health checks
• Infrastructure as Code (Bicep across 4 Azure subscriptions)

Migration timeline overview¶

gantt
    title Typical Cloudera-to-Azure Migration (30 weeks)
    dateFormat  YYYY-MM-DD
    section Phase 1 -- Assessment
    Cluster inventory & profiling      :a1, 2026-05-04, 3w
    Dependency mapping & TCO estimate  :a2, after a1, 2w
    section Phase 2 -- Infrastructure
    Azure landing zone & ADLS Gen2     :a3, after a2, 3w
    Databricks + Unity Catalog deploy  :a4, after a2, 3w
    Purview + Event Hubs + ADF setup   :a5, after a3, 2w
    section Phase 3 -- Data Migration
    HDFS to ADLS (Data Box / WANdisco) :a6, after a4, 4w
    Hive schema + Delta conversion     :a7, after a6, 2w
    section Phase 4 -- Workloads
    Spark jobs to Databricks           :a8, after a7, 4w
    Hive SQL to dbt + Impala migration :a9, after a7, 4w
    Oozie/NiFi to ADF pipelines        :a10, after a7, 4w
    Kafka to Event Hubs                :a11, after a7, 2w
    section Phase 5 -- Validation
    Parallel run (2+ weeks)            :a12, after a8, 3w
    Performance benchmarking           :a13, after a12, 1w
    Cutover & CDH decommission         :a14, after a13, 2w

Cross-references¶

Last updated: 2026-04-30 Maintainers: CSA-in-a-Box core team