sahara/doc/source/userdoc/features.rst

Features Overview

Cluster Scaling

The mechanism of cluster scaling is designed to enable user to change the number of running instances without creating a new cluster. User may change number of instances in existing Node Groups or add new Node Groups.

If cluster fails to scale properly, all changes will be rolled back.

Currently only Vanilla plugin supports this feature. Visit vanilla_plugin for info about cluster topology limitations.

Swift Integration

If you want to work with Swift, e.g. to run jobs on data located in Swift or put jobs` result into it, you need to use patched Hadoop and Swift. For more info about this patching and configuring see hadoop-swift. There is a number of possible configs for Swift which can be set, but currently Sahara automatically set information about swift filesystem implementation, location awareness, URL and tenant name for authorization. The only required information that is still needed to be set are username and password to access Swift. So you need to explicitly specify these parameters while launching the job.

E.g. :

$ hadoop distcp -D fs.swift.service.savanna.username=admin \
 -D fs.swift.service.savanna.password=swordfish \
 swift://integration.savanna/temp swift://integration.savanna/temp1

How to compose a swift URL? The template is: swift://${container}.${provider}/${object}. We don't need to point out the account because it will be automatically determined from tenant name from configs. Actually, account=tenant.

${provider} was designed to provide an opportunity to work with several Swift installations. E.g. it is possible to read data from one Swift installation and write it to another one. But as for now, Sahara automatically generates configs only for one Swift installation with name "savanna".

Currently user can only enable/disable Swift for a Hadoop cluster. But there is a blueprint about making Swift access more configurable: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/savanna/+spec/swift-configuration-through-rest-and-ui

Currently this feature is supported only by vanilla_plugin.

Cinder support

This feature is supported only by vanilla_plugin.

Cinder is a block storage service that can be used as an alternative for an ephemeral drive. Using Cinder volumes increases reliability of data which is important for HDFS service.

User can set how many volumes will be attached to each node in a Node Group and the size of each volume.

All volumes are attached during Cluster creation/scaling operations.

Neutron and Nova Network support

OpenStack Cluster may use Nova Network or Neutron as a networking service. Sahara supports both, but when deployed, a special configuration for networking should be set explicitly. By default Sahara will behave as if Nova Network is used. If OpenStack Cluster uses Neutron, then use_neutron option should be set to True in Sahara configuration file. In addition, if the OpenStack Cluster supports network namespaces, set the use_namespaces option to True

use_neutron=True
use_namespaces=True

Sahara Dashboard should also be configured properly to support Neutron. SAHARA_USE_NEUTRON should be set to True in OpenStack Dashboard local_settings.py configuration file.

SAHARA_USE_NEUTRON=True

Floating IP Management

Sahara needs to access instances through ssh during a Cluster setup. To establish a connection Sahara may use both: fixed and floating IP of an Instance. By default use_floating_ips parameter is set to True, so Sahara will use Floating IP of an Instance to connect. In this case, user has two options for how to make all instances get a floating IP:

• Nova Network may be configured to assign floating IPs automatically by setting auto_assign_floating_ip to True in nova.conf
• User may specify a floating IP pool for each Node Group directly.

Note: When using floating IPs for management (use_floating_ip=True) every instance in the Cluster should have a floating IP, otherwise Sahara will not be able to work with it.

If use_floating_ips parameter is set to False Sahara will use Instances' fixed IPs for management. In this case the node where Sahara is running should have access to Instances' fixed IP network. When OpenStack uses Neutron for networking, user will be able to choose fixed IP network for all instances in a Cluster.

Anti-affinity

One of the problems in Hadoop running on OpenStack is that there is no ability to control where machine is actually running. We cannot be sure that two new virtual machines are started on different physical machines. As a result, any replication with cluster is not reliable because all replicas may turn up on one physical machine. Anti-affinity feature provides an ability to explicitly tell Sahara to run specified processes on different compute nodes. This is especially useful for Hadoop datanode process to make HDFS replicas reliable.

The Anti-Affinity feature requires certain scheduler filters to be enabled on Nova. Edit your /etc/nova/nova.conf in the following way:

[DEFAULT]

...

scheduler_driver=nova.scheduler.filter_scheduler.FilterScheduler
scheduler_default_filters=DifferentHostFilter,SameHostFilter

This feature is supported by all plugins out of the box.

Data-locality

This feature is supported only by vanilla_plugin.

It is extremely important for data processing to do locally (on the same rack, openstack compute node or even VM) as much work as possible. Hadoop supports data-locality feature and can schedule jobs to tasktracker nodes that are local for input stream. In this case tasktracker could communicate directly with local data node.

Sahara supports topology configuration for HDFS and Swift data sources.

To enable data-locality set enable_data_locality parameter to True in Sahara configuration file

enable_data_locality=True

In this case two files with topology must be provided to Sahara. Options compute_topology_file and swift_topology_file parameters control location of files with compute and swift nodes topology descriptions correspondingly.

compute_topology_file should contain mapping between compute nodes and racks in the following format:

compute1 /rack1
compute1 /rack2
compute1 /rack2

Note that compute node name must be exactly the same as configured in openstack (host column in admin list for instances).

swift_topology_file should contain mapping between swift nodes and racks in the following format:

node1 /rack1
node2 /rack2
node3 /rack2

Note that swift node must be exactly the same as configures in object.builder swift ring. Also make sure that VMs with tasktracker service has direct access to swift nodes.

Hadoop versions after 1.2.0 support four-layer topology (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-8468). To enable this feature set enable_hypervisor_awareness option to True in Sahara configuration file. In this case Sahara will add compute node ID as a second level of topology for Virtual Machines.

Heat Integration

Sahara may use OpenStack Orchestration engine (aka Heat) to provision nodes for Hadoop cluster. To make Sahara work with Heat the following steps are required:

• Your OpenStack installation must have 'orchestration' service up and running
• Sahara must contain the following configuration parameter in sahara.conf:

# An engine which will be used to provision infrastructure for Hadoop cluster. (string value)
infrastructure_engine=heat

The following features are supported in the new Heat engine:

Feature	Heat engine	Known issues
Vanilla plugin provisioning	Implemented
HDP plugin provisioning	Implemented
IDH plugin provisioning	Implemented
Cluster scaling	Implemented
Cluster rollback	Implemented
Volumes attachments	Implemented
Hadoop and Swift integration	Not affected
Anti-affinity	Implemented	https://launchpad.net/bugs/1268610
Floating IP Management	Implemented
Neutron support	Implemented
Nova Network support	TBD	https://launchpad.net/bugs/1259176
Elastic Data Processing	Not affected