How to Set Up a Multi-Node Hadoop Cluster on Amazon EC2,

Part 1
Learn how to set up a four node Hadoop cluster using AWS EC2, PuTTy(gen), and WinSCP.

After spending some time playing around on Single-Node pseudo-distributed

cluster, it's time to get into real world hadoop. Depending on what works best Its
important to note that there are multiple ways to achieve this and I am going to cover
how to setup multi-node hadoop cluster on Amazon EC2. We are going to setup 4
node hadoop cluster as below.

NameNode (Master)
SecondaryNameNode
DataNode (Slave1)
DataNode (Slave2)

Heres what you will need

1. Amazon AWS Account

2. PuTTy Windows Client (to connect to Amazon EC2 instance)
3. PuTTYgen (to generate private key this will be used in putty to connect to
EC2 instance)
4. WinSCP (secury copy)

This will be a two part series

In Part-1 I will cover infrastructure side as below

1. Setting up Amazon EC2 Instances

2. Setting up client access to Amazon Instances (using Putty.)
3. Setup WinSCP access to EC2 instances

In Part-2 I will cover the hadoop multi node cluster installation

1. Hadoop Multi-Node Installation and setup

1. Setting up Amazon EC2 Instances

With 4 node clusters and minimum volume size of 8GB there would be an average $2
of charge per day with all 4 running instances. You can stop the instance anytime to
avoid the charge, but you will loose the public IP and host and restarting the instance
will create new ones,. You can also terminate your Amazon EC2 instance anytime
and by default it will delete your instance upon termination, so just be careful what
you are doing.

1.1 Get Amazon AWS Account

If you do not already have a account, please create a new one. I already have AWS
account and going to skip the sign-up process. Amazon EC2 comes with eligible free-
tier instances.
1.2 Launch Instance
Once you have signed up for Amazon account. Login to Amazon Web Services, click
on My Account and navigate to Amazon EC2 Console

1.3 Select AMI

I am picking Ubuntu Server 12.04.3 Server 64-bit OS
1.4 Select Instance Type
Select the micro instance

1.5 Configure Number of Instances

As mentioned we are setting up 4 node hadoop cluster, so please enter 4 as number
of instances. Please check Amazon EC2 free-tier requirements, you may setup 3 node
cluster with < 30GB storage size to avoid any charges. In production environment
you want to have SecondayNameNode as separate machine
1.6 Add Storage
Minimum volume size is 8GB

1.7 Instance Description

Give your instance name and description
1.8 Define a Security Group
Create a new security group, later on we are going to modify the security group with
security rules.

1.9 Launch Instance and Create Security Pair

Review and Launch Instance.

Amazon EC2 uses publickey cryptography to encrypt and decrypt login

information. Publickey cryptography uses a public key to encrypt a piece of data,
such as a password, then the recipient uses the private key to decrypt the data. The
public and private keys are known as a key pair.

Create a new keypair and give it a name hadoopec2cluster and download the
keypair (.pem) file to your local machine. Click Launch Instance
1.10 Launching Instances
Once you click Launch Instance 4 instance should be launched with pending state

Once in running state we are now going to rename the instance name as below.

1. HadoopNameNode (Master)
2. HadoopSecondaryNameNode
3. HadoopSlave1 (data node will reside here)
4. HaddopSlave2 (data node will reside here)
Please note down the Instance ID, Public DNS/URL (ec2-54-209-221-112.compute-
1.amazonaws.com) and Public IP for each instance for your reference.. We will need
it later on to connect from Putty client. Also notice we are using
HadoopEC2SecurityGroup.

You can use the existing group or create a new one. When you create a group with
default options it add a rule for SSH at port 22.In order to have TCP and ICMP access
we need to add 2 additional security rules. Add All TCP, All ICMP and SSH (22)
under the inbound rules to HadoopEC2SecurityGroup. This will allow ping, SSH,
and other similar commands among servers and from any other machine on internet.
Make sure to Apply Rule changes to save your changes.

These protocols and ports are also required to enable communication among cluster
servers. As this is a test setup we are allowing access to all for TCP, ICMP and SSH
and not bothering about the details of individual server port and security.
2. Setting up client access to Amazon Instances
Now, lets make sure we can connect to all 4 instances.For that we are going to use
Putty client We are going setup password-less SSH access among servers to setup the
cluster. This allows remote access from Master Server to Slave Servers so Master
Server can remotely start the Data Node and Task Tracker services on Slave servers.

We are going to use downloaded hadoopec2cluster.pem file to generate the private

key (.ppk). In order to generate the private key we need Puttygen client. You can
download the putty and puttygen and various utilities in zip from here.

2.1 Generating Private Key

Lets launch PUTTYGEN client and import the key pair we created during launch
instance step hadoopec2cluster.pem

Navigate to Conversions and Import Key

Once you import the key You can enter passphrase to protect your private key or
leave the passphrase fields blank to use the private key without any passphrase.
Passphrase protects the private key from any unauthorized access to servers using
your machine and your private key.

Any access to server using passphrase protected private key will require the user to
enter the passphrase to enable the private key enabled access to AWS EC2 server.

2.2 Save Private Key

Now save the private key by clicking on Save Private Key and click Yes as we are
going to leave passphrase empty.
Save the .ppk file and give it a meaningful name
Now we are ready to connect to our Amazon Instance Machine for the first time.

2.3 Connect to Amazon Instance

Lets connect to HadoopNameNode first. Launch Putty client, grab the public URL ,
import the .ppk private key that we just created for password-less SSH access. As per
amazon documentation, for Ubuntu machines username is ubuntu

2.3.1 Provide private key for authentication

2.3.2 Hostname and Port and Connection Type
and Open to launch putty session
when you launch the session first time, you will see below message, click Yes
and will prompt you for the username, enter ubuntu, if everything goes well you will
be presented welcome message with Unix shell at the end.

If there is a problem with your key, you may receive below error message

Similarly connect to remaining 3 machines HadoopSecondaryNameNode,

HaddopSlave1,HadoopSlave2 respectively to make sure you can connect successfully.
2.4 Enable Public Access
Issue ifconfig command and note down the ip address. Next, we are going to update
the hostname with ec2 public URL and finally we are going to update /etc/hosts file
to map the ec2 public URL with ip address. This will help us to configure master ans
slaves nodes with hostname instead of ip address.

Following is the output on HadoopNameNode ifconfig

now, issue the hostname command, it will display the ip address same as inet
address from ifconfig command.

We need to modify the hostname to ec2 public URL with below command

prebuffer_0nbsp;sudo hostname ec2-54-209-221-112.compute-1.ama

zonaws.com
2.5 Modify /etc/hosts
Lets change the host to EC2 public IP and hostname.

Open the /etc/hosts in vi, in a very first line it will show 127.0.0.1 localhost, we need
to replace that with amazon ec2 hostname and ip address we just collected.

Modify the file and save your changes

Repeat 2.3 and 2.4 sections for remaining 3 machines.

3. Setup WinSCP access to EC2 instances

In order to securely transfer files from your windows machine to Amazon EC2
WinSCP is a handy utility.

Provide hostname, username and private key file and save your configuration and
Login
If you see above error, just ignore and you upon successful login you will see unix file
system of a logged in user /home/ubuntu your Amazon EC2 Ubuntu machine.
Upload the .pem file to master machine (HadoopNameNode). It will be used while
connecting to slave nodes during hadoop startup daemons.
SETTING UP HADOOP MULTI-NODE CLUSTER ON AMAZON EC2 PART 2

5 Votes

In Part-1 we have successfully created, launched and connected to Amazon

Ubuntu Instances. In Part-2 I will show how to install and setup Hadoop
cluster. If you are seeing this page first time, I would strongly advise you to
go over Part-1.

In this article

HadoopNameNode will be referred as master,

HadoopSecondaryNameNode will be referred as SecondaryNameNode
or SNN
HadoopSlave1 and HadoopSlave2 will be referred as slaves (where data
nodes will reside)

So, lets begin.

1. Apache Hadoop Installation and Cluster Setup

1.1 Update the packages and dependencies.

Lets update the packages , I will start with master , repeat this for SNN and
2 slaves.

$ sudo apt-get update

Once its complete, lets install java

1.2 Install Java

Add following PPA and install the latest Oracle Java (JDK) 7 in Ubuntu
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java

$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install oracle-jdk7-installer

Check if Ubuntu uses JDK 7

Repeat
this for SNN and 2 slaves.

1.3 Download Hadoop

I am going to use haddop 1.2.1 stable version from apache download page
and here is the 1.2.1 mirror

issue wget command from shell

$ wget http://apache.mirror.gtcomm.net/hadoop/common/hadoop-
1.2.1/hadoop-1.2.1.tar.gz
Unzip the files and review the package content and configuration files.

$ tar -xzvf hadoop-1.2.1.tar.gz

For simplicity, rename the hadoop-1.2.1 directory to hadoop for ease of

operation and maintenance.

$ mv hadoop-1.2.1 hadoop

1.4 Setup Environment Variable

Setup Environment Variable for ubuntu user

Update the .bashrc file to add important Hadoop paths and directories.
Navigate to home directory

$cd

Open .bashrc file in vi edito

$ vi .bashrc

Add following at the end of file

export HADOOP_CONF=/home/ubuntu/hadoop/conf

export HADOOP_PREFIX=/home/ubuntu/hadoop

#Set JAVA_HOME

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-oracle

# Add Hadoop bin/ directory to path

export PATH=$PATH:$HADOOP_PREFIX/bin

Save and Exit.

To check whether its been updated correctly or not, reload bash profile, use
following commands

source ~/.bashrc
echo $HADOOP_PREFIX
echo $HADOOP_CONF
Repeat 1.3 and 1.4 for remaining 3 machines (SNN and 2 slaves).

1.5 Setup Password-less SSH on Servers

Master server remotely starts services on salve nodes, whichrequires

password-less access to Slave Servers. AWS Ubuntu server comes with pre-
installed OpenSSh server.
Quick Note:
The public part of the key loaded into the agent must be put on the target
system in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. This has been taken care of by the AWS
Server creation process
Now we need to add the AWS EC2 Key Pair identity haddopec2cluster.pem to
SSH profile. In order to do that we will need to use following ssh utilities

ssh-agent is a background program that handles passwords for SSH

private keys.
ssh-add command prompts the user for a private key password and
adds it to the list maintained by ssh-agent. Once you add a password
to ssh-agent, you will not be asked to provide the key when using SSH
or SCP to connect to hosts with your public key.

Amazon EC2 Instance has already taken care of authorized_keys on master

server, execute following commands to allow password-less SSH access to
slave servers.

First of all we need to protect our keypair files, if the file permissions are too
open (see below) you will get an error

To fix this problem, we need to issue following commands

$ chmod 644 authorized_keys

Quick Tip: If you set the permissions to chmod 644, you get a file that can
be written by you, but can only be read by the rest of the world.

$ chmod 400 haddoec2cluster.pem

Quick Tip: chmod 400 is a very restrictive setting giving only the file onwer
read-only access. No write / execute capabilities for the owner, and no
permissions what-so-ever for anyone else.
To use ssh-agent and ssh-add, follow the steps below:

1. At the Unix prompt, enter: eval `ssh-agent`Note: Make sure you use
the backquote ( ` ), located under the tilde ( ~ ), rather than the
single quote ( ' ).
2. Enter the command: ssh-add hadoopec2cluster.pem

if you notice .pem file has read-only permission now and this time it works
for us.

Keep in mind ssh session will be lost upon shell exit and you have repeat
ssh-agent and ssh-add commands.

Remote SSH

Lets verify that we can connect into SNN and slave nodes from master
$ ssh ubuntu@<your-amazon-ec2-public URL>
On successful login the IP address on the shell will change.

1.6 Hadoop Cluster Setup

This section will cover the hadoop cluster configuration. We will have to
modify

hadoop-env.sh This file contains some environment variable settings

used by Hadoop. You can use these to affect some aspects of Hadoop
daemon behavior, such as where log files are stored, the maximum
amount of heap used etc. The only variable you should need to change
at this point is in this file is JAVA_HOME, which specifies the path to the
Java 1.7.x installation used by Hadoop.
core-site.xml key property fs.default.name for namenode
configuration for e.g hdfs://namenode/
hdfs-site.xml key property dfs.replication by default 3
mapred-site.xml key property mapred.job.tracker for jobtracker
configuration for e.g jobtracker:8021

We will first start with master (NameNode) and then copy above xml changes
to remaining 3 nodes (SNN and slaves)

Finally, in section 1.6.2 we will have to configure conf/masters and

conf/slaves.

masters defines on which machines Hadoop will start secondary

NameNodes in our multi-node cluster.
slaves defines the lists of hosts, one per line, where the Hadoop
slave daemons (datanodes and tasktrackers) will run.

Lets go over one by one. Start with masters (namenode).

hadoop-env.sh

$ vi $HADOOP_CONF/hadoop-env.sh and add JAVA_HOME shown below and

save changes.
core-site.xml

This file contains configuration settings for Hadoop Core (for e.g I/O) that
are common to HDFS and MapReduce Default file system configuration
property fs.default.name goes here it could for e.g hdfs / s3 which will be
used by clients.

$ vi $HADOOP_CONF/core-site.xml

We are going t0 add two properties

fs.default.name will point to NameNode URL and port (usually 8020)

hadoop.tmp.dir A base for other temporary directories. Its important
to note that every node needs hadoop tmp directory. I am going to
create a new directory hdfstmp as below in all 4 nodes. Ideally you
can write a shell script to do this for you, but for now going the
manual way.

$ cd

$ mkdir hdfstmp

Quick Tip: Some of the important directories

are dfs.name.dir, dfs.data.dir in hdfs-site.xml. The default value for
the dfs.name.dir is ${hadoop.tmp.dir}/dfs/data and dfs.data.dir is$
{hadoop.tmp.dir}/dfs/data. It is critical that you choose your directory
location wisely in production environment.

<configuration>

<property>
<name>fs.default.name</name>
<value>hdfs://ec2-54-209-221-112.compute-
1.amazonaws.com:8020</value>
</property>

<property>
<name>hadoop.tmp.dir</name>
<value>/home/ubuntu/hdfstmp</value>
</property>

</configuration>

hdfs-site.xml

This file contains the configuration for HDFS daemons, the NameNode,
SecondaryNameNode and data nodes.

We are going to add 2 properties

dfs.permissions.enabled with value false, This means that any user,

not just the hdfs user, can do anything they want to HDFS so do not
do this in production unless you have a very good reason. if true,
enable permission checking in HDFS. If false, permission checking is
turned off, but all other behavior is unchanged. Switching from one
parameter value to the other does not change the mode, owner or
group of files or directories. Be very careful before you set this
dfs.replication Default block replication is 3. The actual number of
replications can be specified when the file is created. The default is
used if replication is not specified in create time. Since we have 2 slave
nodes we will set this value to 2.

<configuration>
<property>
<name>dfs.replication</name>
<value>2</value>
</property>
<property>
<name>dfs.permissions</name>
<value>false</value>
</property>
</configuration>

mapred-site.xml

This file contains the configuration settings for MapReduce daemons; the job
tracker and the task-trackers.
The mapred.job.tracker parameter is a hostname (or IP address) and port
pair on which the Job Tracker listens for RPC communication. This parameter
specify the location of the Job Tracker for Task Trackers and MapReduce
clients.

JobTracker will be running on master (NameNode)

<configuration>
<property>
<name>mapred.job.tracker</name>
<value>hdfs://ec2-54-209-221-112.compute-
1.amazonaws.com:8021</value>
</property>
</configuration>

1.6.1 Move configuration files to Slaves

Now, we are done with hadoop xml files configuration master, lets copy the
files to remaining 3 nodes using secure copy (scp)

start with SNN, if you are starting a new session, follow ssh-add as per
section 1.5

from masters unix shell issue below command

$ scp hadoop-env.sh core-site.xml hdfs-site.xml mapred-
site.xml [email protected]
1.amazonaws.com:/home/ubuntu/hadoop/conf

repeat this for slave nodes

1.6.2 Configure Master and Slaves

Every hadoop distribution comes with master and slaves files. By default it
contains one entry for localhost, we have to modify these 2 files on both
masters (HadoopNameNode) and slaves (HadoopSlave1 and
HadoopSlave2) machines we have a dedicated machine for
HadoopSecondaryNamdeNode.
1.6.3 Modify masters file on Master machine

conf/masters file defines on which machines Hadoop will start Secondary

NameNodes in our multi-node cluster. In our case, there will be two
machines HadoopNameNode and HadoopSecondaryNameNode

Hadoop HDFS user guide : The secondary NameNode merges the fsimage
and the edits log files periodically and keeps edits log size within a limit. It is
usually run on a different machine than the primary NameNode since its
memory requirements are on the same order as the primary NameNode. The
secondary NameNode is started by bin/start-dfs.sh on the nodes specified
in conf/masters file.

$ vi $HADOOP_CONF/masters and provide an entry for the hostename where

you want to run SecondaryNameNode daemon. In our case
HadoopNameNode and HadoopSecondaryNameNode

1.6.4 Modify the slaves file on master machine

The slaves file is used for starting DataNodes and TaskTrackers

$ vi $HADOOP_CONF/slaves

1.6.5 Copy masters and slaves to SecondaryNameNode

Since SecondayNameNode configuration will be same as NameNode, we need

to copy master and slaves to HadoopSecondaryNameNode.
1.6.7 Configure master and slaves on Slaves node

Since we are configuring slaves (HadoopSlave1 & HadoopSlave2) , masters

file on slave machine is going to be empty

$ vi $HADOOP_CONF/masters

Next, update the slaves file on Slave server (HadoopSlave1) with the IP
address of the slave node. Notice that the slaves file at Slave node contains
only its own IP address and not of any other Data Node in the cluster.

$ vi $HADOOP_CONF/slaves
Similarly update masters and slaves for HadoopSlave2

1.7 Hadoop Daemon Startup

The first step to starting up your Hadoop installation is formatting the

Hadoop filesystem which runs on top of your , which is implemented on top
of the local filesystems of your cluster. You need to do this the first time you
set up a Hadoop installation. Do not format a running Hadoop filesystem,
this will cause all your data to be erased.

To format the namenode

$ hadoop namenode -format

Lets start all hadoop daemons from HadoopNameNode

$ cd $HADOOP_CONF

$ start-all.sh

This will start

NameNode,JobTracker and SecondaryNameNode daemons

on HadoopNameNode
 SecondaryNameNode daemons on HadoopSecondaryNameNode

and DataNode and TaskTracker daemons on slave

nodes HadoopSlave1 and HadoopSlave2

We can check the namenode status from http://ec2-54-209-221-

112.compute-1.amazonaws.com:50070/dfshealth.jsp
Check Jobtracker status : http://ec2-54-209-221-112.compute-
1.amazonaws.com:50030/jobtracker.jsp

Slave Node Status for HadoopSlave1 : http://ec2-54-209-223-7.compute-

1.amazonaws.com:50060/tasktracker.jsp
Slave Node Status for HadoopSlave2 : http://ec2-54-209-219-2.compute-
1.amazonaws.com:50060/tasktracker.jsp

To quickly verify our setup, run the hadoop pi example

ubuntu@ec2-54-209-221-112:~/hadoop$ hadoop jar hadoop-examples-

1.2.1.jar pi 10 1000000

Number of Maps = 10
Samples per Map = 1000000
Wrote input for Map #0
Wrote input for Map #1
Wrote input for Map #2
Wrote input for Map #3
Wrote input for Map #4
Wrote input for Map #5
Wrote input for Map #6
Wrote input for Map #7
Wrote input for Map #8
Wrote input for Map #9
Starting Job
14/01/13 15:44:12 INFO mapred.FileInputFormat: Total input paths to
process : 10
14/01/13 15:44:13 INFO mapred.JobClient: Running job:
job_201401131425_0001
14/01/13 15:44:14 INFO mapred.JobClient: map 0% reduce 0%
14/01/13 15:44:32 INFO mapred.JobClient: map 20% reduce 0%
14/01/13 15:44:33 INFO mapred.JobClient: map 40% reduce 0%
14/01/13 15:44:46 INFO mapred.JobClient: map 60% reduce 0%
14/01/13 15:44:56 INFO mapred.JobClient: map 80% reduce 0%
14/01/13 15:44:58 INFO mapred.JobClient: map 100% reduce 20%
14/01/13 15:45:03 INFO mapred.JobClient: map 100% reduce 33%
14/01/13 15:45:06 INFO mapred.JobClient: map 100% reduce 100%
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: Job complete:
job_201401131425_0001
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: Counters: 30
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: Job Counters
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: Launched reduce tasks=1
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: SLOTS_MILLIS_MAPS=145601
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: Total time spent by all
reduces waiting after reserving slots (ms)=0
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: Total time spent by all maps
waiting after reserving slots (ms)=0
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: Launched map tasks=10
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: Data-local map tasks=10
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO
mapred.JobClient: SLOTS_MILLIS_REDUCES=33926
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: File Input Format Counters
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: Bytes Read=1180
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: File Output Format Counters
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: Bytes Written=97
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: FileSystemCounters
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: FILE_BYTES_READ=226
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: HDFS_BYTES_READ=2740
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: FILE_BYTES_WRITTEN=622606
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: HDFS_BYTES_WRITTEN=215
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: Map-Reduce Framework
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: Map output materialized
bytes=280
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: Map input records=10
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: Reduce shuffle bytes=280
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: Spilled Records=40
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: Map output bytes=180
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: Total committed heap usage
(bytes)=2039111680
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: CPU time spent (ms)=9110
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: Map input bytes=240
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: SPLIT_RAW_BYTES=1560
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: Combine input records=0
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: Reduce input records=20
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: Reduce input groups=20
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: Combine output records=0
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: Physical memory (bytes)
snapshot=1788379136
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: Reduce output records=0
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: Virtual memory (bytes)
snapshot=10679681024
14/01/13 15:45:09 INFO mapred.JobClient: Map output records=20
Job Finished in 57.825 seconds
Estimated value of Pi is 3.14158440000000000000
You can check the job tracker status page to look at complete job status
Drill down into completed job and you can see more details on Map Reduce
tasks.

At last do not forget to terminate your amazon ec2 instances or you will be
continued to get charged
Thats it for this article, hope you find it useful