Santa Clara, CA — Sept. 25, 2025 — Cloudera today announced updates to its platform, specifically Cloudera Iceberg REST Catalog and Cloudera Lakehouse Optimizer, both “strengthening the company’s commitment to delivering the best open data lakehouse powered by Iceberg,” the company said.
With these updates, Iceberg REST Catalog provides open interoperability for sharing data seamlessly, while Lakehouse Optimizer ensures data is always optimized and cost-effective for all engines accessing the data, all under Cloudera’s unified governance and security. These enhanced capabilities were unveiled at EVOLVE25 NYC—Cloudera’s premiere AI and data industry event.
As enterprises race to unlock the power of AI and analytics, they face significant barriers: complex data architectures, siloed platforms, and inconsistent governance. Moving data between systems for analysis or AI training increases costs, introduces security risks, and delays insights. Modern organizations need open, secure, and interoperable data architectures that support data anywhere for AI everywhere and multi-engine analytics without forcing data duplication or vendor lock-in.
Cloudera is the first and only provider to integrate the Iceberg REST Catalog across a full-lifecycle data and AI platform, enabling secure, zero-copy data sharing and unified governance across any cloud or data center. Cloudera’s new offering solves these challenges by integrating the Iceberg REST Catalog into its platform. This allows third-party engines to access Cloudera-managed data directly—without copying or moving it—and ensures consistent policy enforcement and metadata intelligence in public clouds, data centers, and the edge. Cloudera is the only vendor capable of delivering unified security, governance, and interoperability across the entire data lifecycle—from real-time ingestion and large-scale processing to AI and BI consumption. By extending the power of Apache Iceberg with REST-based access, Cloudera enables enterprises to future-proof their data strategies while retaining control, visibility, and compliance.
Following these updates, all Cloudera customers on Iceberg will now benefit from seamless zero-copy interoperability across the ecosystem, enabling connections to leading analytics and AI engines such as Snowflake, Databricks, AWS Athena, AWS EMR, and Salesforce—with full ACID compliance and unified access policies. They will also gain enterprise-grade governance, extending fine-grained access controls, lineage, and auditing to third-party tools through Cloudera’s Shared Data Experience (SDX), which ensures secure data democratization and compliance at scale. In addition, customers will have open metadata access, providing instant discoverability of data assets without being locked into proprietary catalogs, which accelerates AI development and business intelligence with a consistent source of truth.
Finally, these enhancements deliver lower total cost of ownership and faster time to value: customers report up to a 79% reduction in data storage costs while improving visibility across lines of business. For example, a major global satellite customer realized these savings while simultaneously strengthening their AI data pipelines.
The Cloudera Lakehouse Optimizer is a new, intelligent service that delivers automated optimizations and table maintenance for Apache Iceberg within Cloudera’s lakehouse. It uniquely offers advanced, intelligent optimizations that go beyond basic table maintenance, including tasks like rewriting manifest and position delete files. By intelligently optimizing tables, it eliminates the need for manual data management tasks and operational costs, allowing customers to focus on extracting insights from their data. It’s an open solution, applicable to any Iceberg-compatible engine on any public cloud, and provides unmatched observability and control through a unique user interface that allows for granular policy definition and modification. Policies can be applied to a specific table or an entire catalog, and the service will be the only one of its kind available on-premises in a future release. Internal benchmarks show that this service improves query performance by up to 13x and reduces storage costs by 36%.
“Cloudera pioneered the Big Data industry, and we are the only platform provider that continues to invest in making the Apache Iceberg open table format enterprise ready,” said Leo Brunnick, Chief Product Officer, Cloudera. “With today’s news, we continue to deliver on the promise of flexibility, scalability, and uncompromised insights when and where you need them the most. That commitment is why the world’s largest organizations rely on Cloudera to bring AI to their data—wherever it lives.”
Both Cloudera Data Sharing powered by Iceberg REST Catalog and Cloudera Lakehouse Optimizer are now offered through General Availability. To learn more, visit cloudera.com.
