Techniques are described for providing a unified client to interact with a distributed processing platform such as a Hadoop cluster. The unified client may include multiple sub-clients each of which is configured to interface with a particular subsystem of the distributed processing platform, such as MapReduce, Hive, Spark, and so forth. The unified client may be included in an application to provide, for the application, a single interface for communications between the application and the distributed processing platform during a unified communication session.