Using Oozie in Kerberized Cluster

Posted: November 22, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Hadoop, kerberos, oozie | Tags: , , | 2 Comments

In general, most Hadoop ecosystem tools work rather transparently in a kerberized cluster. Most of the time things “just work”. This includes Oozie. Still, when things don’t “just work”, they tend to fail with slightly alarming and highly ambiguous error messages. Here are few tips for using Oozie when your Hadoop cluster is kerberized. Note that this is a client/user guide. I assume you already followed the documentation on how to configure the Oozie server in the kerberized cluster (or you are using Cloudera Manager, which magically configures it for you).

    1. As always, use “kinit” to authenticate with Kerberos and get your tgt before trying to run oozie commands. Verify with klist. Failure to do this will result in “No valid credentials provided (Mechanism level: Failed to find any Kerberos tgt)”
    2. I always enable security debug messages. This helps me troubleshoot, and also helps when I need to ask support/mailing list for help. 
      export HADOOP_ROOT_LOGGER=TRACE,console;
export HADOOP_JAAS_DEBUG=true;
export HADOOP_OPTS="-Dsun.security.krb5.debug=true"
    3. Your Oozie command typically contains a URL. Something like “oozie -url http://myserver:11000/oozie -conf job.properties -run” The server name in the URL must match an existing principal name in Kerberos. If your principals are actually “myserver.mydomain.com” make sure you use that in the URL.
    4. If you decide to use CURL to connect to your Oozie server, either for troubleshooting or for using the REST API, don’t forget to use “–negotiate -u foo:bar”. The actual username and password don’t matter (you are authenticating with your Kerberos ticket), but CURL throws a fit if they don’t exist.
    5. If you have Hive action in your Oozie workflow, you need to define and use credentials. Here’s an example: 
      <workflow-app xmlns="uri:oozie:workflow:0.2.5" name="example-wf">
        <credentials>
                <credential name='hive_credentials' type='hcat'>
                        <property>
                            <name>hcat.metastore.uri</name>
                            <value>thrift://metastore_server:9083</value>
                        </property>
                        <property>
                            <name>hcat.metastore.principal</name>
                            <value>hive/_HOST@KERBDOM.COM</value>
                        </property>
                </credential>
        </credentials>
<start to="hive-example"/>
<action name="hive-example" cred="hive_credentials">
        <hive xmlns="uri:oozie:hive-action:0.2">
                <job-tracker>${jobTracker}</job-tracker>
                <name-node>${nameNode}</name-node>
                <job-xml>${hiveSiteXML}</job-xml>
                <script>${dbScripts}/hive-example.hql</script>
        </hive>
        <ok to="end"/>
        <error to="fail"/>
</action>
<kill name="fail">
        <message>Workflow failed, error message[${wf:errorMessage(wf:lastErrorNode())}]</message>
</kill>
<end name="end"/>
</workflow-app>
    6. To make step #5 actually work (i.e. allow Oozie to run Hive actions), you will also need to do the following:
      In CM:

      7. go to “HDFS Service->Configuration->Service-Wide->Advanced->Cluster-wide Configuration Safety Valve for core-site.xml” and add:

      <property>
<name>hadoop.proxyuser.oozie.hosts</name>
<value>*</value>
</property>
<property>
<name>hadoop.proxyuser.oozie.groups</name>
<value>*</value>
</property>

      – go to “Oozie service->Configuration->Oozie Server(default)->Advanced-> Oozie Server Configuration Safety Valve for oozie-site.xml” and add:

      <property>
<name>oozie.credentials.credentialclasses</name>
<value>hcat=org.apache.oozie.action.hadoop.HCatCredentials</value>
</property>

      – Deploy client configuration and restart Hive service and Oozie service.

    7. Oozie doesn’t kinit a user for you on the node its launching the action on, and it doesn’t move principles and tickets around. Instead it uses delegation tokens. If you want to authenticate to Hadoop inside a shell or java action, you’ll need to use the same tokens.

      In a shell action, it will be something like:

      if [ -z ${HADOOP_TOKEN_FILE_LOCATION} ]
then
	hive -e "select x from test" -S
else
	hive -e "SET mapreduce.job.credentials.binary=$HADOOP_TOKEN_FILE_LOCATION; select x from test" -S
fi

      In Java it will be:

      if (System.getenv("HADOOP_TOKEN_FILE_LOCATION") != null) {
            jobConf.set("mapreduce.job.credentials.binary", System.getenv("HADOOP_TOKEN_FILE_LOCATION"));
}

    Hope this helps! Feel free to comment with questions, especially if you ran into errors that I did not address. I’ll be happy to add more tips to the list.

Three Things To Do Before Starting Hadoop Project

Posted: October 20, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | 2 Comments

I spent the last 6 month helping customers design, implement and deploy successful Hadoop systems. Over time, you start seeing patterns. Certain things that if the customer gets right before the project event starts increase the probability that the project will finish successfully and on-time.

Lets assume you already took the most important step – you have an actual use-case or a problem to solve, and you think  Hadoop could be the right technology to use in this case. What now?

  1. Learn how to automate production deployments: 
    Yes, Cloudera Manager would do a lot for you. But occasionally you’ll need to run the same command on 20+ servers. Thats what large clusters are all about. So get used to the idea from the beginning. Learn how to write loops in bash, how to ssh into remote machines to run commands, how to distribute files and restart services.
    You can build your own tools (I had for years), but these days you can just pick your favorite automation tool and use that instead. My favorite is Ansible. It works exactly the way I would have written a cluster automation tool, so learning it never felt like an effort and its usage is never surprising or unintuitive to me. Others prefer Puppet, Chef or Cfengine. It doesn’t matter what you use, but when I show up at your office as your Cloudera Solutions Architect and ask you to update sysctl.conf on your 50 node cluster, I don’t want you too look surprised, alarmed or tell me it will take few hours.
  2. Don’t try to boil the ocean:
    Hadoop implementation is often the first chance the dev/ops teams get to do something completely new. There is a blank slate, white sheet of paper, and you can design the perfect system. Fixing every problem the old system had and building functionality you always dreamed of.Better security!  Machine learning! Open source!
    I say – Using Hadoop successfully is a large and challenging project. Changing organizational processes and culture toward better security and processes is a large and challenging project. Creating a data driven organization is a huge project. Mixing them doesn’t give you three projects for the price of one. It isn’t even just three times more challenging than one project, I’d say the risk is an order of magnitude higher, and the risk of just implementing Hadoop is high enough. Especially in the early stages. Which brings us to… 
  3. Do a POC:
     Pay Cloudera or do it yourself. Either way, you need a POC. 
    If you start with a 12 month project, you will have to do a lot of design upfront. At a time when you have too little information. At the beginning of a large project, you won’t know for sure how the system will be used and you probably won’t know enough about Hadoop. Sure, you can call Cloudera Services and discuss the design with us, but even we can sometimes (rarely!) get things wrong. With 12 month projects you will be very deep in the project before you’ll find that limitation we completely forgot to mention.
    Be agile (really agile, 6 month project with daily scrum doesn’t count): Solve the smallest useful problem first. Implement just a single workflow, single statistical analysis, parse and search data from one source. Whatever is useful for your users – do it first. Learn in the process and build from there. This will allow you to build experience and iron-out issues at the system’s usefulness, load and importance grow.
  4. (Bonus tip) Get the most out of the POC: 
    Not all POCs are created equal. Sometimes the customer hires us to “prove that Hadoop can do X”. We get very specific requirements and very short time-frame, and we need to build a system that does X. I can see why customers need proof that their vendor can deliver. But this approach is of limited value. Because at the end of the POC you are left with a non-production system and you don’t know more Hadoop than you knew before. I love teaching, but when the attitude is “prove us this works” and the requirements are inflexible, there isn’t much time for discussions and casual learning. Most of the knowledge transfer will only happen in the delivery document, which is not the same as lively discussions.
    Better POC happens when a customer brings in Cloudera to help them build their first Hadoop project. There are still time and scope constraints, but now the POC is not about “Prove us this works” but rather “Help us make it work”. We work together as a team. We will brainstorm design possibilities with you and share best practices. We will teach you how to build the system, how to configure it and troubleshoot it. You get a chance to learn all our little tricks of development and deployment that makes life easier. At the end of the POC, your team will have real Hadoop expertise, relevant to your specific system, problems, culture, data and requirements. I see this as the best investment you can make in Hadoop for your organization. 
    But I may be a bit biased.

 

Control Charts

Posted: October 14, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Data Science | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

Last week, while working on customer engagement, I learned a new method of quantifying behavior of time-series data. The method is called “Control Chart” and credit to Josh Wills, our director of data science, for pointing it out. I thought I’ll share it with my readers as its easy to understand, easy to implement, flexible and very useful in many situations.

The problem is ages old – you collect measurements over time and want to know when your measurements indicate abnormal behavior. “Abnormal” is not well defined, and thats on purpose – we want our method to be flexible enough to match what you define as an issue.

For example, lets say Facebook are interested in tracking usage trend for each user, catching those with decreasing use

There are few steps to the Control Chart method:

  1. Collect all relevant data points. In our case, number of minutes of Facebook use per day for each user.
  2. Calculate a baseline – this can be average use for each user or average use for similar demographics.  Even adaptive average of the type calculated by Oracle Enterprise Manager, to take into account decreased Facebook use over the weekend.
  3. Calculate “zones” one, two and three standard deviations around the baseline

Those zones can be used to define rules for normal and abnormal behaviors of the system. These rules are what makes the system valuable.
Examples of rules that define abnormal behavior can be:

  1. Any point 3 standard deviations above the baseline. This will indicate extreme sudden increase.
  2. 7 consecutive measurements more than one standard deviation over the baseline. This indicates a sustained increase.
  3. 9 consecutive measurement each higher than previous one. This indicates steady upward trend.
  4. 6 consecutive measurements each more than two standard deviations away from baseline, each one of different side of the baseline than the previous measurement. This indicates instability of the system.

There are even sets of standard rules used in various industries, best practices of sorts. Western Electric rules and Nelson rules are particularly well know.

Note how flexible the method is – you can use any combination of rules that will highlight abnormalities you are interested in highlighting.
Also note that while the traditional use indeed involves charts, the values and rules are very easy to calculate programmatically and visualization can be useful but not mandatory.
If you measure CPU utilization on few servers, visualizing the chart and actually seeing the server behavior can be useful. If you are Facebook and monitor user behavior, visualizing a time series of every one of their millions of users is hopeless. Calculating baselines, standard deviations and rules for each use is trivial.

Also note how this problem is “embarrassingly parallel“. To calculate behavior for each user, you only need to look at data for that particular user. Parallel, share-nothing platform like Hadoop can be used to scale the calculation indefinitely simply by throwing increasing number of servers on the problem. The only limit is the time it takes to calculate the rules for a single user.

Naturally, I didn’t dive into some of the complexities in using Control Charts.  Such as how to select a good baseline, how to calculate standard deviation (or whether to use another statistic to define zones) and how many measurements should be examined before a behavior signals a trend. If you think this tool is useful for you, I encourage you to investigate more deeply.

 

Big Data News from Oracle OpenWorld 2013

Posted: October 7, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , | 6 Comments

Only a week after Oracle OpenWorld concluded and I already feel like I’m hopelessly behind on posting news and impressions. Behind or not, I have news to share!

The most prominent feature announced at OpenWorld is the “In-Memory Option”  for Oracle Database 12c.  This option is essentially a new part of the SGA that caches tables in column formats. This is expected to make data warehouse queries significantly faster and more efficient. I would have described the feature in more details, but Jonathan Lewis gave a better overview in this forum discussion, so just go read his post.

Why am I excited about a feature that has nothing to do with Hadoop?

First, because I have a lot of experience with large data warehouses. So I know that big data often means large tables, but only few columns used in each query. And I know that in order to optimize these queries and to avoid expensive disk reads every time each query runs, we build indexes on those columns, which makes data loading slow. In-memory option will allow us to drop those indexes and just store the columns we need in memory.

Second, because I’m a huge fan of in-memory data warehouses, and am happy that Oracle is now making these feasible. Few TB of memory in a large server are no longer science fiction, which means that most of your data warehouse will soon fit in memory. Fast analytics for all! And what do you do with the data that won’t fit in memory? Perhaps store it in your Hadoop cluster.

Now that I’m done being excited about the big news, lets talk about small news that you probably didn’t notice but you should.

Oracle announced two cool new features for the Big Data Appliance. Announced may be a big word, Larry Ellison did not stand up on stage and talked about them. Instead the features sneaked quietly into the last upgrade and appeared in the documentation.

Perfect Balance – If you use Hadoop as often as I do, you know how data skew can mess with query performance. You run a job with several reducers, each aggregates data for a subset of keys. Unless you took great care in partitioning your data, the data will not be evenly distributed between the reducers, usually because it wasn’t evenly distributed between the keys. As a result, you will spend 50% of the time waiting for that one last reducer to finish already.

Oracle’s Perfect Balance makes the “took great case in partitioning your data” part much much easier. This blog post is just a quick overview, not an in-depth blog post, so I won’t go into details of how this works (wait for my next post on this topic!). I’ll just mention that Perfect Balance can be used without any change to the application code, so if you are using BDA, there is no excuse not to use it.

And no excuse to play solitaire while waiting for the last reducer to finish.

Oracle XQuery for Hadoop – Announced but not officially released yet, which is why I’m pointing you at an Amis blog post. For now thats the best source of information about this feature. This feature, combined with the existing Oracle Loader for Hadoop will allow running XQuery operations on XMLs stored in Hadoop, pushing down the entire data processing bit to Map Reduce on the Hadoop cluster. Anyone who knows how slow, painful and CPU intensive XML processing can be on an Oracle database server will appreciate this feature. I wish I had it a year ago when I had to ingest XMLs at a very high rate. It is also so cool that I’m a bit sorry that we never developed more awesome XQuery capabilities for Hive and Impala. Can’t wait for the release so I can try that!

During OpenWorld there was also additional exposure for existing, but perhaps not very well known Oracle Big Data features – Hadoop for ODI, Hadoop for OBIEE and using GoldenGate with Hadoop. I’ll try to write more about those soon.

Meanwhile, let me know what you think of In-Memory, Perfect Balance and OXH.

My Oracle OpenWorld 2013 Presentations

Posted: September 30, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | 2 Comments

Oracle OpenWorld was fantastic, as usual. The best show in San Francisco. This is the seventh year in a row that I’m attending – 3 times as HP employee, 3 times as Pythian employee, and now as a Clouderan. My life changes, but the event and people are always fantastic.

There will be a separate blogpost about what I learned at the event, new exciting products and my thoughts of them. But first, let me follow up on what I taught.

On Sunday afternoon, and then again on Thursday afternoon, I presented “Data Wrangling with Oracle Connectors for Hadoop”. I presented it twice because both Oracle and IOUG liked my abstract. I was surprised to discover that both audiences had no idea what “Data Wrangling” is! I appreciate the attendees, they trusted me enough to attend without even being sure what I’m planning to talk about. In both sessions I had people come up with excellent questions, mentioning that they are current or future Cloudera customers. I absolutely loved it, what a great opportunity to connect with Hadoopers from all industries.

You can find the slides here: Data Wrangling with Oracle Connectors for Hadoop

On Monday, at OakTable World, I presented ETL on Hadoop. I presented it at Surge earlier this year, but this time I think I misjudged the fit of the content to the audience – I gave pretty technical tips of how to implement ETL on Hadoop to an audience with very little experience with Hadoop. They were smart people and mostly followed along, but I should have kept my content to more introductory level.

You can find the slides here: Scaling ETL with Hadoop

On Wednesday, I was fortunate to present with my former colleague Marc Fielding on SSDs and their use in Exadata. The topic is not very Hadoop related, but I love SSDs regardless and presenting with Marc was fun and the audience was highly engaged. I did get a lot of questions on SSDs and Hadoop, so I’ll consider writing about the topic in the future.

Marc has the latest version of the slides, but you can find an approximation here: Databases in a Solid State World.

Thanks again to everyone who attended, to all the customers who stopped to say hello and to everyone who was friendly and made the event fun. I hope to see you again next year.

Hadoop Summit 2013 – The Schedule

Posted: June 26, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: conferences, Hadoop | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

90% of winning is planning. I learned this as a kid from my dad, and I validated this through many years of work in operations. This applies to everything in life, including conferences.

So in order to maximize fun, networking and learning in Hadoop Summit, I’m planning my schedule in advance. Even if only few hours in advance. Its the thought that counts.

In addition to social activities such as catching up with my former colleagues from Pythian, dining with my distributed solutions architecture team in Cloudera and participating in the Hadoop Summit bike ride, I’m also planning to attend few sessions.

There are tons of good sessions at the conference, and it was difficult to pick. It is also very possible that I’ll change my plans in the last minute based on recommendations from other attendees. For the benefit of those who would like soume recommendations, or to catch up with me at the conference, here’s where you can find me:

Wednesday:

11:20am: Securing the Hadoop Ecosystem – Security is important, but I’ll admit that I’m only attending this session because I’m a fan of ATM. Don’t judge.

12am: LinkedIn Member Segmentation Platform: A Big Data Application – LinkedIn are integrating Hive and Pig with Teradata. Just the type of use case I’m interested in, from my favorite social media company.

2:05pm: How One Company Offloaded Data Warehouse ETL To Hadoop and Saved $30 Million – I’m a huge believer in offloading ETL to Hadoop and I know companies who saved big bucks that way. But $30M is more than even I’d expect, so I have to hear this story.

2:55pm: HDFS – What is New and Future – Everything Hadoop relies on HDFS, so keeping updated with new features is critical for Hadoop professionals. This should be a packed room.

4:05pm: Parquet: Columnar storage for the People – Parquet is a columnar data store for Hadoop. I’m interesting to learn more about Parquet as it should enable smoother transition of data warehouse workloads to Hadoop.

Thursday:

11:50pm: Mahout and Scalable Natural Language Processing – This session is promising so much data science content in one hour, that I’m a bit worried that my expectations are too high. Hope it doesn’t disappoint.

1:40pm:  Hadoop Hardware @Twitter: Size does matter  – I’m expecting operations level talk about sizing of Hadoop clusters. Something nearly every company adopting Hadoop is struggling with.

2:30pm: Video Analysis in Hadoop – A Case Study – My former colleagues at Pythian are presenting a unique Hadoop use-case they developed. I have to be there.

3:35pm: Large scale near real-time log indexing with Flume and SolrCloud – I’m encountering this type of architecture quite often now. Will be interesting to hear how Cisco are doing it.

5:15pm: Building a geospatial processing pipeline using Hadoop and HBase and how Monsanto is using it to help farmers increase their yield – Using Hadoop to analyze large amounts of geospatial data and help farmers. Sounds interesting. Also, Robert is a customer and a very sharp software architect, so worth attending.

Expect me to tweet every 5 minutes from one of the sessions. Its my way of taking notes and sharing knowledge.  If you are at the conference and want to get together, ping me through here or twitter. Also ping me if you think I’m missing a not-to-be-missed session.

See you at Hadoop Summit!