deb-sahara/doc/source/userdoc/features.rst

Features Overview

This page highlights some of the most prominent features available in sahara. The guidance provided here is primarily focused on the runtime aspects of sahara, for discussions about configuring the sahara server processes please see the configuration.guide and advanced.configuration.guide.

Anti-affinity

One of the problems with running data processing applications on OpenStack is the inability to control where an instance is actually running. It is not always possible to ensure that two new virtual machines are started on different physical machines. As a result, any replication within the cluster is not reliable because all replicas may turn up on one physical machine. To remedy this, sahara provides the anti-affinity feature to explicitly command all instances of the specified processes to spawn on different Compute nodes. This is especially useful for Hadoop data node processes to increase HDFS replica reliability.

Starting with the Juno release, sahara can create server groups with the anti-affinity policy to enable this feature. Sahara creates one server group per cluster and assigns all instances with affected processes to this server group. Refer to the Nova documentation on how server groups work.

This feature is supported by all plugins out of the box, and can be enabled during the cluster template creation.

Block Storage support

OpenStack Block Storage (cinder) can be used as an alternative for ephemeral drives on instances. Using Block Storage volumes increases the reliability of data which is important for HDFS service.

A user can set how many volumes will be attached to each instance in a node group, and the size of each volume.

All volumes are attached during cluster creation/scaling operations.

Cluster scaling

Cluster scaling allows users to change the number of running instances in a cluster without needing to recreate the cluster. Users may increase or decrease the number of instances in node groups or add new node groups to existing clusters.

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

Data-locality

It is extremely important for data processing applications to perform work locally on the same rack, OpenStack Compute node, or virtual machine. Hadoop supports a data-locality feature and can schedule jobs to task tracker nodes that are local for the input stream. In this manner the task tracker nodes can communicate directly with the local data nodes.

Sahara supports topology configuration for HDFS and Object Storage data sources. For more information on configuring this option please see the data_locality_configuration documentation.

Distributed Mode

The installation.guide suggests launching sahara as a single sahara-all process. It is also possible to run sahara in distributed mode with sahara-api and sahara-engine processes running on several machines simultaneously. Running in distributed mode allows sahara to offload intensive tasks to the engine processes while keeping the API process free to handle requests.

For an expanded discussion of configuring sahara to run in distrbuted mode please see the distributed-mode-configuration documentation.

Hadoop HDFS High Availability

Hadoop HDFS High Availability (HDFS HA) provides an architecture to ensure that HDFS will continue to work in the result of an active namenode failure. It uses 2 namenodes in an active/standby configuration to provide this availibility.

High availability is achieved by using a set of journalnodes and Zookeeper servers along with ZooKeeper Failover Controllers (ZKFC) and additional configuration changes to HDFS and other services that use HDFS.

Currently HDFS HA is only supported with the HDP 2.0.6 plugin. The feature is enabled through a cluster_configs parameter in the cluster's JSON:

"cluster_configs": {
        "HDFSHA": {
                "hdfs.nnha": true
        }
}

Networking support

Sahara supports both the nova-network and neutron implementations of OpenStack Networking. By default sahara is configured to behave as if the nova-network implementation is available. For OpenStack installations that are using the neutron project please see neutron-nova-network.

Object Storage support

Sahara can use OpenStack Object Storage (swift) to store job binaries and data sources utilized by its job executions and clusters. In order to leverage this support within Hadoop, including using Object Storage for data sources for EDP, Hadoop requires the application of a patch. For additional information about enabling this support, including patching Hadoop and configuring sahara, please refer to the hadoop-swift documentation.

Orchestration support

Sahara may use the OpenStack Orchestration engine (heat) to provision nodes for clusters. For more information about enabling Orchestration usage in sahara please see orchestration-configuration.

Plugin Capabilities

The following table provides a plugin capability matrix:

+ Feature	Plugin ---------+ Vanilla	----------+ HDP	----------+ Cloudera	-------+ Spark
Nova and Neutron network	x	x	x	x
Cluster Scaling	x	Scale Up	x	x
Swift Integration	x	x	x	N/A
Cinder Support	x	x	x	x
Data Locality	x	x	N/A	x
EDP	x	x	x	x

Security group management

Sahara allows you to control which security groups will be used for created instances. This can be done by providing the security_groups parameter for the node group or node group template. The default for this option is an empty list, which will result in the default project security group being used for the instances.

Sahara may also create a security group for instances in the node group automatically. This security group will only contain open ports for required instance processes and the sahara engine. This option is useful for development and for when your installation is secured from outside environments. For production environments we recommend controlling the security group policy manually.

Volume-to-instance locality

Having an instance and an attached volume on the same physical host can be very helpful in order to achieve high-performance disk I/O operations. To achieve this, sahara provides access to the Block Storage volume intance locality functionality.

For more information on using volume instance locality with sahara, please see the volume_instance_locality_configuration documentation.