Locate Accumulo/HDFS and Zookeepers on same server? - hadoop

I have been working on a project where the Zookeepers are colocated on the same server as my Accumulo cluster / HDFS. Everything works in regards to them communicating, but now I am going to begin to rework some of the other infrastructure and might look more into this.
I am wondering is this the best practice, because I had a thought where maintenance might be easier if things are broken up. I know HDFS/Accumulo need to be together, but as far as the Zookeepers go, should the remain on the same machine, or be placed on another, or separate ones for each (probably no reason to do this)? Are there any benefits in terms of autoscaling where if HDFS/Accumulo are by themselves and are 'uninterrupted' by the Zookeepers you could say could perform better?

I assume you're talking about the master nodes (Namenode, AccumuloMaster, etc). If so, then theres no problem (with 2 caveats). If you're talking about datanodes, then its pretty bad practice and ZooKeeper should be moved to (at least) the master nodes.
There are two things that absolutely kill ZooKeeper performance: swapping and seeking. So, as long as theres enough memory and a dedicated device (not mount) for ZooKeeper you should be fine.

Related

3 Node Cluster for Elastic, Kafka and Cassandra - On 3 Machines

We are creating a 3 node elastic cluster, but want to use each of our 3 elastic nodes for other things, like Kafka and Cassandra. We need high availability, so we want to have 3 nodes for everything, but we don't want to have 9 machines, we just want to put them on one bigger computer. Is this a typical scenario?
I would say no.
One sandbox machine running a PoC with all the components local, sure, why not. But Production with HA requirements, you are just asking for trouble putting everything in one place. They're going to compete for resource, one blowing the box up kills the others, touching the machine to change one risks the others, etc, etc.
IMO keep your architecture clean and deploy on separate nodes for each component.

What is the difference between Foreman and Hue for Hadoop?

In researching various administration platforms I would like to know the difference between, when to/not use Foreman and Hue for Hadoop/HDFS?
Thank you.
This is an apples to oranges comparison, as the two have completely different purposes.
Hue is an interface that is used to analyze data that lives within your Hadoop environment, allowing easy access to Hive/Impala interfaces, a logical representation of your HDFS filesystem, and more. This tool would be used by your analysts and decision makers in order to derive meaning from the data you've been working so hard to collect (or at the very minimum, make pretty graphs with it), and for administrators to manage the logical filesystem, Hive/Impala tables, and Mapreduce Jobs.
Foreman is a tool for managing physical and virtual servers on your cluster, allowing you to manage, configure, provision, and monitor your nodes. This tool would be used by your administrators to manage the physical aspects of your cluster, such as adding/removing nodes and making sure your nodes are performing (generally, by looking at pretty graphs).
The only thing these tools have in common are their shared capacity for producing pretty graphs.

Elasticsearch: 2-node cluster with failover

I am using Elasticsearch 1.5.2 and trying to setup a 2-node cluster. These 2 nodes are primarily for failover strategy (if any one node goes down, the other one is still there to handle requests), I don't need to divide primary shards or something like that, (total data is no more than 500mb on hard-disk).
Everything goes well, until Split Brains thing kicks in. Now, since I don't have much data, I don't feel any requirement of 3 nodes. And I want to have failover mechanism too. Which means, discovery.zen.minimum_master_nodes cannot be more than 1.
Now, I have two questions:
Is there any configuration possible, which could overcome 2 master nodes or Split Brains problem?
If not, what all other options do I have to make it work? Like, keeping both in different clusters (one online, other one offline) and updating offline with online, time to time, for the time when online cluster goes down. Or, do I have to go for 3-node cluster?
I am going on production environment. Please help.

Parallel processing of several files in a cluster

At the company I work for, everyday we have to process a few thousands of files, which takes some hours. The operations are basically CPU intensive, like converting PDF to high resolution images and later creating many different sizes os such images.
Each one of those tasks takes a lot of CPU, and therefore we can't simply start many instances on the same machine because there won't be any processing power available for everything. Thus, it takes some hours to finish everything.
The most obvious thing to do, as I see it, is to partition the set of files and have them processed by more machines concurrently (5, 10, 15 machines, I don't know yet how many would be necessary).
I don't want to reinvent the wheel and create a manager for task (nor do I want the hassle), but I am not sure which tool should I use.
Although we don't have big data, I have looked at Hadoop for a start (we are running at Amazon), and its capabilities of handling the nodes seem interesting. However, I don't know if it makes sense to use it. I am looking at Hazelcast as well, but I have no experience at all with it or the concepts yet.
What would be a good approach for this task?
Hadoop is being used for a wide variety of data processing problems, some of them are related to image processing also. The problem mentioned in the OP can also be easily solved using Hadoop. Note that in some cases where the data to processed is small, then there is an overhead using Hadoop.
If you are new to Hadoop, would suggest a couple of things
Buy the Hadoop : The Definitive Guide book.
Go through the MapReduce resources.
Start going through the tutorials (1 and 2) and setup Hadoop on a single node and a cluster. There is no need for Amazon, if 1-2 machines can be spared for learning.
Run the sample programs and understand how they work.
Start migrating the problem area to Hadoop.
The advantage of Hadoop over other s/w is the ecosystem around Hadoop. As of now the ecosystem around Hadoop is huge and growing, I am not sure of Hazelcast.
You can use Hazelcast distributed queue.
First you can put your files (file references) as tasks to a distributed queue.
Then each node takes a task from the queue processes it and puts the result into another distributed queue/list or write it to DB/storage.

How to use HBase and Hadoop to serve live traffic AND perform analytics? (Single cluster vs separate clusters?)

Our primary purpose is to use Hadoop for doing analytics. In this use case, we do batch processing, so throughput is more important than latency, meaning that HBase is not necessarily a good fit (although getting closer to real-time analytics does sound appealing). We are playing around with Hive and we like it so far.
Although analytics is the main thing we want to do in the immediate future with Hadoop, we are also looking to potentially migrate parts of our operations to HBase and to serve live traffic out of it. The data that would be stored there is the same data that we use in our analytics, and I wonder if we could just have one system for both live traffic and analytics.
I have read a lot of reports and it seems that most organizations choose to have separate clusters for serving traffic and for analytics. This seems like a reasonable choice for stability purposes, since we plan to have many people writing Hive queries, and badly written queries could potentially compromise the live operations.
Now my question is: how are those two different use cases reconciled (serving live traffic and doing batch analytics)? Do organizations use systems to write all data in two otherwise independent clusters? Or is it possible to do this out of the box with a single cluster in which some of the nodes serve live traffic and others do only analytics?
What I'm thinking is that we could perhaps have all data coming into the nodes that are used for serving live traffic, and let the HDFS replication mechanisms manage the copying of data into nodes that are used for analytics (increasing the replication higher than the default 3 probably makes sense in such scenario). Hadoop can be made aware of special network topologies, and it has functionality to always replicate at least one copy to different racks, so this seems to mesh well with what I'm describing.
The nodes dedicated to live traffic could be set to have zero (or few) map and reduce slots, so that all Hive queries end up being processed by the nodes dedicated to analytics.
The nodes dedicated to analytics would always be a little behind those dedicated to serving live traffic, but that does not seem to be a problem.
Does that kind of solution make sense? I am thinking it could be more simple to have one cluster than two, but would this be significantly riskier? Are there known cases of companies using a HBase cluster to serve live traffic while also running batch analytics jobs on it?
I'd love to get your opinions on this :) !
Thanks.
EDIT: What about Brisk? It's based on Cassandra instead of HBase, but it seems to be made exactly for what I'm describing (hybrid clusters). Has anyone worked with it before? Is it mature?
--
Felix
Your approach has a few problems... even in rack aware mode, if you have more than a few racks I don't see how you can be guaranteed your nodes will be replicated on those nodes. If you lose one of your "live" nodes, then you will be under-replicated for a while and won't have access to that data.
HBase is greedy in terms of resources and I've found it doesn't play well with others (in terms of memory and CPU) in high load situations. You mention, too, that heavy analytics can impact live performance, which is also true.
In my cluster, we use Hadoop quite a bit to preprocess data for ingest into HBase. We do things like enrichment, filtering out records we don't want, transforming, summarization, etc. If you are thinking you want to do something like this, I suggest sending your data to HDFS on your Hadoop cluster first, then offloading it to your HBase cluster.
There is nothing stopping you from having your HBase cluster and Hadoop cluster on the same network backplane. I suggest instead of having hybrid nodes, just dedicate some nodes to your Hadoop cluster and some nodes to your Hbase cluster. The network transfer between the two will be quite snappy.
Just my personal experience so I'm not sure how much of it is relevant. I hope you find it useful and best of luck!
I think this kind of solution might have sense, since MR is mostly CPU intensive and HBASE is a memory hungry beast. What we do need - is to properly arrange resource management. I think it is possible in the following way:
a) CPU. We can define maximum number of MR mappers/reducers per slot and assuming that each mapper is single threaded we can limit CPU consumption of the MR. The rest will go to HBASE.
b) Memory.We can limit memory for mappers and reducers and the rest give to HBASE.
c) I think we can not properly manage HDFS bandwidth sharing, but I do not think it should be a problem for HBASE -since for it disk operations are not on the critical path.

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