Cloudera Workshop for Vodafone

As one of the largest telecommunications providers, Vodafone probably sits on more data than most major companies. To get the most of that data, they had a third party set up a Cloudera data lake service for them.

However, their engineers were never trained on how to get the most out of the powerful Cloudera environment. It quickly seemed like their major investment in new tech was not going to deliver the results they were looking for.

Unfortunately, we see situations like this all the time. As the very first fully certified Cloudera partner in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, we’ve seen new vendors come and go — many focused only on selling the technology without providing their clients with the necessary training on how to get the most out of it.

Luckily, most of the Gauss Algorithmic founders have deep roots in the telco world, and in 2018 Vodafone got in contact with us to see if we could help them out. After fully understanding the business goals that they were trying to accomplish through Cloudera, we designed and executed a fully customized, 3-day workshop for their data engineers and business managers.

The goal was to pass on practical experiences and allow participants to try various workloads in the Cloudera environment.

We designed the workshop as 30 % theory and 70 % hands-on, where we pushed for active participation. Each participant had their copy of a similar solution in the cloud, which was deployed in production. We discussed the installation, data transfer options, how to best prepare data for end-to-end solutions, and what to do if problems occur. We also mentioned our best practices and tips for working with the Cloudera platform.

“Due to the processing of huge amounts of data for advanced analysis of mobile network performance, at Vodafone, we had to move from relatively small relational databases to Big Data solutions and the choice fell on Hadoop distribution from Cloudera. We needed to take an intensive course as soon as possible, which would acquaint us with the Hadoop ecosystem both theoretically and, above all, practically. That's why we turned to Gauss, who met our expectations 100 percent,” mentions Michal Štursa, chapter lead of big data at Vodafone.

We have completed installations in the most demanding environments and we were happy to share our know-how at the training. Part of the workshop was also working with git, through which we provide both materials and exercises. Everything was available to participants even after the workshop, so they could repeat some processes in their own environment.

"The interaction with the participants was great. On the very first day, we realized that Vodafone data teams are facing challenging tasks in real operations. Together we tried to discover the best ways to solve tasks and practically show what awaits them in the near future," explains Johnson Darkwah, who led the workshop.

The whole workshop lasted three days and we provided everything from the training itself, through the premises to refreshments.

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