Upgraded APIs: Flink (0.8) and HBase (0.98.x) + profiles

I had to create an hadoop.core.version variable to manage the fact that cloudera has different versions for hadoop-core and hadoop-common..
Have you checked if using an empty configuration is working in a distributed setting? 
Where does the hostname of the HBase master come from? Is it maybe using a default value (localhost) which works on in a local setup only?