Hadoop

The Apache™ Hadoop® project develops open-source software for reliable, scalable, distributed computing.

The Apache Hadoop software library is a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers using simple programming models. It is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage. Rather than rely on hardware to deliver high-availability, the library itself is designed to detect and handle failures at the application layer, so delivering a highly-available service on top of a cluster of computers, each of which may be prone to failures.

The Hadoop framework transparently provides both reliability and data motion to applications. Hadoop implements a computational paradigm named MapReduce,^[2] where the application is divided into many small fragments of work, each of which can execute or re-execute on any node in the cluster. In addition, it provides a distributed file system that stores data on the compute nodes, providing very high aggregate bandwidth across the cluster. Both map/reduce and the distributed file system are designed so that node failures are automatically handled by the framework.^[3] It enables applications to work with thousands of computation-independent computers andpetabytes of data. The entire Apache Hadoop “platform” is now commonly considered to consist of the Hadoop kernel, MapReduce andHadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), as well as a number of related projects – including Apache Hive, Apache HBase, and others.^[4]

Hadoop is written in the Java programming language and is an Apache top-level project being built and used by a global community of contributors.^[5] Hadoop and its related projects (Hive, HBase, Zookeeper, and so on) have many contributors from across the ecosystem.^[6] Though Java code is most common, any programming language can be used with "streaming" to implement the "map" and "reduce" parts of the system.^[7]

Architecture[edit]

See also: Hadoop Distributed File System, Apache HBase, and MapReduce

Hadoop consists of the Hadoop Common package, which provides filesystem and OS level abstractions, a MapReduce engine (either MapReduce or YARN) and the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). The Hadoop Common package contains the necessary Java ARchive (JAR)files and scripts needed to start Hadoop. The package also provides source code, documentation and a contribution section that includes projects from the Hadoop Community.^{[citation needed]}

For effective scheduling of work, every Hadoop-compatible file system should provide location awareness: the name of the rack (more precisely, of the network switch) where a worker node is. Hadoop applications can use this information to run work on the node where the data is, and, failing that, on the same rack/switch, reducing backbone traffic. HDFS uses this method when replicating data to try to keep different copies of the data on different racks. The goal is to reduce the impact of a rack power outage or switch failure, so that even if these events occur, the data may still be readable.^[12]

A multi-node Hadoop cluster

A small Hadoop cluster includes a single master and multiple worker nodes. The master node consists of a JobTracker, TaskTracker, NameNode and DataNode. A slave or worker node acts as both a DataNode and TaskTracker, though it is possible to have data-only worker nodes and compute-only worker nodes. These are normally used only in nonstandard applications.^[13] Hadoop requires Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 1.6 or higher. The standard start-up and shutdown scripts require Secure Shell (ssh) to be set up between nodes in the cluster.^[14]

In a larger cluster, the HDFS is managed through a dedicated NameNode server to host the file system index, and a secondary NameNode that can generate snapshots of the namenode's memory structures, thus preventing file-system corruption and reducing loss of data. Similarly, a standalone JobTracker server can manage job scheduling. In clusters where the Hadoop MapReduce engine is deployed against an alternate file system, the NameNode, secondary NameNode and DataNode architecture of HDFS is replaced by the file-system-specific equivalent.

File systems[edit]

Hadoop distributed file system[edit]

HDFS is a distributed, scalable, and portable file-system written in Java for the Hadoop framework. Each node in a Hadoop instance typically has a single namenode; a cluster of datanodes form the HDFS cluster. The situation is typical because each node does not require a datanode to be present. Each datanode serves up blocks of data over the network using a block protocol specific to HDFS. The file system uses the TCP/IP layer for communication. Clients use Remote procedure call (RPC) to communicate between each other.

HDFS stores large files (typically in the range of gigabytes to terabytes^[15]) across multiple machines. It achieves reliability byreplicating the data across multiple hosts, and hence does not require RAID storage on hosts. With the default replication value, 3, data is stored on three nodes: two on the same rack, and one on a different rack. Data nodes can talk to each other to rebalance data, to move copies around, and to keep the replication of data high. HDFS is not fully POSIX-compliant, because the requirements for a POSIX file-system differ from the target goals for a Hadoop application. The tradeoff of not having a fully POSIX-compliant file-system is increased performance for data throughput and support for non-POSIX operations such as Append.^[16]

HDFS added high-availability capabilities, as announced for release 2.0 in May 2012,^[17] allowing the main metadata server (the NameNode) to be failed over manually to a backup in the event of failure. The project has also started developing automatic fail-over.

The HDFS file system includes a so-called secondary namenode, which misleads some people into thinking^{[citation needed]} that when the primary namenode goes offline, the secondary namenode takes over. In fact, the secondary namenode regularly connects with the primary namenode and builds snapshots of the primary namenode's directory information, which the system then saves to local or remote directories. These checkpointed images can be used to restart a failed primary namenode without having to replay the entire journal of file-system actions, then to edit the log to create an up-to-date directory structure. Because the namenode is the single point for storage and management of metadata, it can become a bottleneck for supporting a huge number of files, especially a large number of small files. HDFS Federation, a new addition, aims to tackle this problem to a certain extent by allowing multiple name-spaces served by separate namenodes.

An advantage of using HDFS is data awareness between the job tracker and task tracker. The job tracker schedules map or reduce jobs to task trackers with an awareness of the data location. For example: if node A contains data (x,y,z) and node B contains data (a,b,c), the job tracker schedules node B to perform map or reduce tasks on (a,b,c) and node A would be scheduled to perform map or reduce tasks on (x,y,z). This reduces the amount of traffic that goes over the network and prevents unnecessary data transfer. When Hadoop is used with other file systems this advantage is not always available. This can have a significant impact on job-completion times, which has been demonstrated when running data-intensive jobs.^[18]

HDFS was designed^{[by whom?]} for mostly immutable files^[16] and may not be suitable for systems requiring concurrent write-operations.

Another limitation of HDFS is that it cannot be mounted directly by an existing operating system. Getting data into and out of the HDFS file system, an action that often needs to be performed before and after executing a job, can be inconvenient. A Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) virtual file system has been developed to address this problem, at least for Linux and some other Unix systems.

File access can be achieved through the native Java API, the Thrift API to generate a client in the language of the users' choosing (C++, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, Erlang, Perl, Haskell, C#, Cocoa, Smalltalk, and OCaml), the command-line interface, or browsed through the HDFS-UI webapp over HTTP.

JobTracker and TaskTracker: the MapReduce engine[edit]

Main article: MapReduce

Above the file systems comes the MapReduce engine, which consists of one JobTracker, to which client applications submit MapReduce jobs. The JobTracker pushes work out to available TaskTracker nodes in the cluster, striving to keep the work as close to the data as possible. With a rack-aware file system, the JobTracker knows which node contains the data, and which other machines are nearby. If the work cannot be hosted on the actual node where the data resides, priority is given to nodes in the same rack. This reduces network traffic on the main backbone network. If a TaskTracker fails or times out, that part of the job is rescheduled. The TaskTracker on each node spawns off a separate Java Virtual Machine process to prevent the TaskTracker itself from failing if the running job crashes the JVM. A heartbeat is sent from the TaskTracker to the JobTracker every few minutes to check its status. The Job Tracker and TaskTracker status and information is exposed by Jetty and can be viewed from a web browser.

If the JobTracker failed on Hadoop 0.20 or earlier, all ongoing work was lost. Hadoop version 0.21 added some checkpointing to this process; the JobTracker records what it is up to in the file system. When a JobTracker starts up, it looks for any such data, so that it can restart work from where it left off.

Known limitations of this approach are:

• The allocation of work to TaskTrackers is very simple. Every TaskTracker has a number of available slots (such as "4 slots"). Every active map or reduce task takes up one slot. The Job Tracker allocates work to the tracker nearest to the data with an available slot. There is no consideration of the current system load of the allocated machine, and hence its actual availability.
• If one TaskTracker is very slow, it can delay the entire MapReduce job - especially towards the end of a job, where everything can end up waiting for the slowest task. With speculative execution enabled, however, a single task can be executed on multiple slave nodes.

Scheduling[edit]

By default Hadoop uses FIFO, and optional 5 scheduling priorities to schedule jobs from a work queue.^[28] In version 0.19 the job scheduler was refactored out of the JobTracker, and added the ability to use an alternate scheduler (such as the Fair scheduler or the Capacity scheduler).^[29]

Fair scheduler[edit]

The fair scheduler was developed by google. The goal of the fair scheduler is to provide fast response times for small jobs and QoSfor production jobs. The fair scheduler has three basic concepts.^[30]

1. Jobs are grouped into Pools.
2. Each pool is assigned a guaranteed minimum share.
3. Excess capacity is split between jobs.

By default, jobs that are uncategorized go into a default pool. Pools have to specify the minimum number of map slots, reduce slots, and a limit on the number of running jobs.

Capacity scheduler[edit]

The capacity scheduler was developed by Yahoo. The capacity scheduler supports several features that are similar to the fair scheduler.^[31]

• Jobs are submitted into queues.
• Queues are allocated a fraction of the total resource capacity.
• Free resources are allocated to queues beyond their total capacity.
• Within a queue a job with a high level of priority has access to the queue's resources.

There is no preemption once a job is running.

Other applications[edit]

The HDFS file system is not restricted to MapReduce jobs. It can be used for other applications, many of which are under development at Apache. The list includes the HBase database, the Apache Mahout machine learning system, and the Apache Hive Data Warehousesystem. Hadoop can in theory be used for any sort of work that is batch-oriented rather than real-time, that is very data-intensive, and able to work on pieces of the data in parallel. As of October 2009, commercial applications of Hadoop^[32] included:

• Log and/or clickstream analysis of various kinds
• Marketing analytics
• Machine learning and/or sophisticated data mining
• Image processing
• Processing of XML messages
• Web crawling and/or text processing
• General archiving, including of relational/tabular data, e.g. for compliance