Apache Kudu is afree and open sourcecolumn-oriented data store of theApache Hadoop ecosystem. It is compatible with most of the data processing frameworks in theHadoop environment. It provides completeness to Hadoop's storage layer to enable fast analytics on fast data.[3]
Theopen source project to build Apache Kudu began as internal project atCloudera.[4] The first version Apache Kudu 1.0 was released 19 September 2016.[5]
Kudu was designed and optimized forOLAP workloads. Like HBase, it is a real-time store that supports key-indexed record lookup and mutation.[6] Kudu differs from HBase since Kudu's datamodel is a more traditional relational model, while HBase is schemaless. Kudu's "on-disk representation is truly columnar and follows an entirely different storage design than HBase/Bigtable".[6]
Kudu 1.18.0 was released on July 14, 2025.
Is Kudu open source? Yes, Kudu is open source and licensed under the Apache Software License, version 2.0. Apache Kudu is a top level project (TLP) under the umbrella of the Apache Software Foundation.
Kudu 1.0.0 was released on September 19, 2016. It is the first release not considered "beta". [...] Kudu 0.5.0 (beta) was released on Sep 28, 2015. It was the first public version of Kudu.
