Posts

Mario Meir-Huber
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Hadoop where are you heading to? Or: what is the future of Hadoop

One of my 5 predictions for 2019 is about Hadoop. Basically, I do expect that a lot of projects won’t take Hadoop as a full-blown solution anymore. Why is that? What is the future of Hadoop?

What happend to the future of Hadoop?

Basically, one of the most exciting news in 2018 was the merger between Hortonworks and Cloudera. The two main competitors now joining forces? How can this happen? Basically, I do believe that a lot of that didn’t come out of a strength of the two and that they somehow started to “love” each other but rather out of economical calculations. Now, it isn’t a competition between Hortonworks or Cloudera anymore (even before the merger), it is rather Hadoop vs. new solutions.

These solutions are highly diversified – Apache Spark is one of the top competitors to it. But there are also other platforms such as Apache Kafka and some NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, plus TensorFlow emerging. One would now argue that all of that is included in a Cloudera or Hortonworks distribution, but it isn’t as simple as that. Spark and Kafka founders provider their own distributions of their stack, more lightweight than the complex Hadoop stack. In several use-cases, it is simply not necessary to have a full-blown solution but rather go for a light-weighted one.

The Cloud is the real threat to Hadoop

But the real thread rather comes from something else: the Cloud. Hadoop was always running better on bare-metal and still both pre-merger companies are arguing that in fact Hadoop does better run on bare-metal. Other solutions such as Spark are performing better in the Cloud and built for the Cloud. This is the real threat for Hadoop, since the Cloud is simply something that won’t go away now – with most companies switching to it.

Object stores provide a great and cheap alternative to HDFS and the management of Object Stores is ways easier. I only call it an alternative here since Object Stores still miss several Enterprise Features. However, I expect that the large cloud providers such as AWS and Microsoft will invest significantly in this space and provide great additions to their object stores even this year. Object Stores in the cloud will catch up fast this year – and probably surpass HDFS functionality by 2020. If this happens and the cost benefits remain better than bare-metal Hadoop, there is really no need for it anymore.

On the analytics layer, the cloud is also ways superior. Running dynamic Spark Jobs against data in object stores (or managed NoSQL databases) are impressive. You don’t have to manage Clusters anymore, which takes a lot of pain and headache away from large IT departments. This will increase performance and speed of developments. Another disadvantage I see for the leading Hadoop solutions is their salesforce: they get better compensated for on-prem solutions, so they try to tell companies to keep out of the cloud – which isn’t the best strategy in 2019.

What about enterprise adoption of Hadoop?

However, there is still some hope about Enterprise Integration, which is often handled better from Hadoop distributions. And even though the entire world is moving on the Cloud, there are still many legacy systems running on-premise. Also, after the HWX/Cloudera merger, their mission statement became of being the leading company for big data in the cloud. So if they are going to fully execute this, I am sure that there will be a huge market share ahead of them – and the initially described threads could even be turned down. Let’s see what 2019 and 2020 will bring in this respect and what the future of Hadoop might bring.

This post is part of the “Big Data for Business” tutorial. In this tutorial, I explain various aspects of handling data right within a company

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Mario Meir-Huber
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How to: Start and Stop Cloudera on Azure with the Azure CLI

The Azure CLI is my favorite tool to manage Hadoop Clusters on Azure. Why? Because I can use the tools I am used to from Linux now from my Windows PC. In Windows 10, I am using the Ubuntu Bash for that, which gives me all the major tools for managing remote Hadoop Clusters.
One thing I am doing frequently, is starting and stopping Hadoop Clusters based on Cloudera. If you are coming from Powershell, this might be rather painfull for you, since you can only start each vm in the cluster sequentially, meaning that a cluster consisting of 10 or more nodes is rather slow to start and might take hours! In the Azure CLI I can easily do this by specifiying “–nowait” and all runs in parallel. The only disadvantage is that I won’t get any notifications on when the cluster is ready. But I am doing this with a simple hack: ssh’ing into the cluster (since I have to do this anyway). SSH will succeed once the Masternodes are ready and so I can perform some tasks on the nodes (such as restarting Cloudera Manager since CM is usually a bit “dizzy” after sending it to sleep and waking it up again :))
Let’s start with the easiest step: stopping the cluster. The Azure CLI always starts with “az” as command (meaning Azure of course). The command for stopping one or more vm’s with the Azure CLI is “vm stop”. The only two things I need to provide now are the id’s I want to stop and “–nowait” since I want to quit the script right after.
So, the script would look like the following:

az vm stop --ids YOUR_IDS --no-wait

However, this has still one major disadvantage: you would need to provide all ID’s Hardcoded. This doesn’t matter at all if your cluster never changes, but in my case I add and delete vm’s to or from the cluster, so this script doesn’t play well for my case. However, the CLI is very flexible (and so is bash) and I can query all my vm’s in a resource group. This will give me the IDs which are currently in the cluster (let’s assume I delete dropped vm’s and add new vm’s to the RG). The Query for retrieving all VMs in a Resource Group is easy:

az vm list --resource-group YOUR_RESOURCE_GROUP --query "[].id" -o tsv

This will give me all IDs in the RG. The real fun starts when doing this in one statement:

az vm stop --ids $(az vm list --resource-group clouderarg --query "[].id" -o tsv) --no-wait

Which is really nice and easy 🙂
It is similar with starting VMs in a Resource Group:

az vm start --ids $(az vm list --resource-group mmhclouderarg --query "[].id" -o tsv) --no-wait
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Mario Meir-Huber
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Why building Hadoop on your own doesn't make sense

There are several things people discuss when it comes to Hadoop and there are some wrong discussions. First, there is a small number of people believing that Hadoop is a hype that will end at some point in time. They often come from a strong DWH background and won’t accept (or simply ignore) the new normal. But there are also some people that basically coin two major sayings: the first group of people states that Hadoop is cheap because it is open source and the second group of people states that Hadoop is expensive because it is very complicated. (Info: by Hadoop, I also include Spark and alike)

Neither the one nor the other is true.

First, you can download it for free and install it on your system. This makes it basically free in terms of licenses, but not in terms of running it. When you get a vanilla Hadoop, you will have to think about hotfixes, updates, services, integration and many more tasks that will get very complicated. This ends up in spending many dollars on Hadoop experts to solve your problems. Remember: you didn’t solve any business problem/question so far, as you are busy running the system! You spend dollars and dollars on expensive operational topics instead of spending them on creating value for your business.

Now, we have the opposite. Hadoop is expensive. Is it? In the past years I saw a lot of Hadoop projects the went more or less bad. Costs were always higher than expected and the project timeframe was never kept. Hadoop experts have a high income as well, which makes consulting hours even more expensive. Plus: you probably won’t find them on the market, as they can select what projects to make. So you have two major problems: high implementation cost and low ressource availability.

The pain of cluster sizing

Another factor that is relevant to the cost discussion is the cluster utilization. In many projects I could see one trend: when the discussion about cluster sizing is on, there are two main decisions: (a) sizing the cluster to the highest expected utilization or (b) making the cluster smaller than the highest expected utilization. If you select (a), you have another problem: the cluster might be under-utilized. What I could see and what my clients often have, is the following: 20% of the time, they have full utilization on the cluster, but 80% of the time the cluster utilization is below 20%. This basically means that your cluster is very expensive when it comes to business case calculation. If you select (b), you will loose business agility and your projects/analytics might require long compute times.

At the beginning of this article, I promised to explain that Hadoop is still cost-effective. So far, I only stated that it might be expensive, but this would mean that it isn’t cost effective. Hadoop is still cost effective but I will give you a solution in my next blog post on that, so stay tuned 😉

This post is part of the “Big Data for Business” tutorial. In this tutorial, I explain various aspects of handling data right within a company

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Mario Meir-Huber
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My Big Data predictions for 2016

As 2016 is around the corner, the question is what this year will bring for Big Data. Here are my top assumptions for the year to come:

  • The growth for relational databases will slow down, as more companies will evaluate Hadoop as an alternative to classic rdbms
  • The Hadoop stack will get more complicated, as more and more projects are added. It will almost take a team to understand what each of these projects does
  • Spark will lead the market for handling data. It will change the entire ecosystem again.
  • Cloud vendors will add more and more capability to their solutions to deal with the increasing demand for workloads in the cloud
  • We will see a dramatic increase of successful use-cases with Hadoop, as the first projects come to a successful end

What do you think about my predictions? Do you agree or disagree?

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Mario Meir-Huber
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Big Data and Hadoop E-Books at reduced price

2 Big Data and Hadoop E-Books are available at a special promotion. The reduced price is only valid for 1 week, so make sure to order soon! The offer expires on 21th of December and are available on the Kindle store. The two E-Books are:

  • Big Data (Introduction); 0.99$ instead of 5$: Get it here
  • Hadoop (Introduction); 0.99$ instead of 5$: Get it here

Have fun reading it!

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Mario Meir-Huber
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How to kill your Big Data initiative

Everyone is doing Big Data these days. If you don’t work on Big Data projects within your company, you are simply not up to date and don’t know how things work. Big Data solves all of your problems, really!
Well, in reality this is different. It doesn’t solve all your problems. It actually creates more problems then you think! Most companies I saw recently working on Big Data projects failed. They started a Big Data project and successfully wasted thousands of dollars on Big Data projects. But what exactly went wrong?
First of all, Big Data is often only seen as Hadoop. We live with the mis-perception that only Hadoop can solve all Big Data topics. This simply isn’t true. Hadoop can do many things – but real data science is often not done with the core of Hadoop. Ever talked to someone doing the analytics (e.g someone good in math or statistics)?. They are not ok with writing Java Map/Reduce queries or Pig/Hive scripts. They want to work with other tools that are ways more interactive.
The other thing is that most Big Data initiatives are often handled wrong. Most initiatives often simply don’t include someone being good in analytics. One simply doesn’t find this type of person in an IT team – the person has to be found somewhere else. Failing to include someone with this skills often leads to finding “nothing” in the data – because IT staff is good in writing queries – but not in doing complex analytics. These skills are actually not thought in IT classes – it requires a totally different study field to reach this skill set.
Hadoop as the solution to everything for many IT departments. However, projects often stop with implementing Hadoop. Most Hadoop implementations never leave the pilot phase. This is often due to the fact that IT departments see Hadoop as a fun thing to play with – but getting this into production requires a different approach. There are actually more solutions out there that can be done when delivering a Big Data project.
A key to ruining your Big Data project is not involving the LoB. The IT department often doesn’t know what questions to ask. So how can they know the answer and try to find the question? The LoB sees that different. They see an answer – and know what question it would be.
The key to kill your Big Data initiative is exactly one thing: go with the hype. Implement Hadoop and don’t think about what you actually want to achieve with it. Forget the use-case, just go and play with the fancy technology. NOT
As long as companies will stich to that, I am sure I will have enough work to do. I “inherited” several failed projects and turned them into success. So, please continue.

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Mario Meir-Huber
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Hadoop Tutorial – Working with the Apache Hue GUI

When working with the main Hadoop services, it is not necessary to work with the console at all time (event though this is the most powerful way of doing so). Most Hadoop distributions also come with a User Interface. The user interface is called “Apache Hue” and is a web-based interface running on top of a distribution. Apache Hue integrates major Hadoop projects in the UI such as Hive, Pig and HCatalog. The nice thing about Apache Hue is that it makes the management of your Hadoop installation pretty easy with a great web-based UI.
The following screenshot shows Apache Hue on the Cloudera distribution.
apache-hue
Apache Hue

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Mario Meir-Huber
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Hadoop Tutorial – Hadoop Commons

Apache Commons is one of the easiest things to explain in the Hadoop context – even though it might get complicated when working with it. Apache Commons is a collection of libraries and tools that are often necessary when working with Hadoop. These libraries and tools are then used by various projects in the Hadoop ecosystem. Samples include:

  • A CLI minicluster, that enables a single-node Hadoop installation for testing purposes
  • Native libraries for Hadoop
  • Authentification and superusers
  • A Hadoop secure mode

You might not use all of these tools and libraries that are in Hadoop Commons as some of them are only used when you work on Hadoop projects.

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Mario Meir-Huber
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Hadoop Tutorial – Serialising Data with Apache Avro

Apache Avro is a service in Hadoop that enables data serialization. The main tasks of Avro are:

  • Provide complex data structures
  • Provide a compact and fast binary data format
  • Provide a container to persist data
  • Provide RPC’s to the data
  • Enable the integration with dynamic languages

Avro is built with a JSON Schema, that allows several different types:

Elementary types

  • Null, Boolean, Int, Long, Float, Double, Byte and String

Complex types

  • Record, Enum, Array, Map, Union and Fixed

The sample below demonstrates an Avro schema

{“namespace”: “person.avro”,

“type”: “record”,

“name”: “Person”,

“fields”: [

{“name”: “name”, “type”: “string”},

{“name”: “age”,  “type”: [“int”, “null”]},

{“name”: “street”, “type”: [“string”, “null”]}

]

}

Table 4: an avro schema

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Mario Meir-Huber
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Hadoop Tutorial – Import large amount of data with Apache Sqoop

Apache Sqoop is in charge of moving large datasets between different storage systems such as relational databases to Hadoop. Sqoop supports a large number of connectors such as JDBC to work with different data sources. Sqoop makes it easy to import existing data into Hadoop.

Sqoop supports the following databases:

  • HSQLDB starting version 1.8
  • MySQL starting version 5.0
  • Oracle starting version 10.2
  • PostgreSQL
  • Microsoft SQL

Sqoop provides several possibilities to import and export data from and to Hadoop. The service also provides several mechanisms to validate data.

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