---
layout: post
title: Conception and validation of Hadoop BigData stack.
date: '2011-12-28T00:59:00+00:00'
categories: bigtop
---
<p>
With more and more people jumping on the bandwagon of big data it is very gratifying to see that Hadoop is gaining momentum every day.<br /> <br />
Even more fascinating is too see how the idea of putting together a 
bunch of service components on top of Hadoop proper is getting more and 
more steam. IT and software development professionals are getting 
better understanding of benefits that a flexible set of loosely 
coupled yet compatible components provides when one needs to customize 
a data processing solution at scale.<br /> <br />
The biggest problem for most businesses trying to add Hadoop 
infrastructure into their existing IT is a lack of the knowledge, 
professional support, and/or clear understanding of what's out there on 
the market to help you. Essentially, Hadoop exists in one incarnation - 
this is the open-source project under the umbrella of Apache Software 
Foundation (ASF). This is where all the innovations in Hadoop are coming
 from. And essentially this is a source of profit for a few commercial 
offerings. <br /> <br />
What's wrong with the picture, you might ask? Well, the main issue with 
most of those offerings are mostly two folds. They are 
either immature and based on sometimes unfinished nor unreleased 
Hadoop code, or provide no significant value add compare to Hadoop 
proper available in source form from <a href="http://hadoop.apache.org/">hadoop.apache.org</a>.
 And no matter if any of above (or both of them together) apply to a 
commercial solution based on Hadoop, you can be sure of one thing: these
 solutions will cost you literally tons of money - as much as&nbsp; 
$1k/node/year in some cases - for what is essentially available for 
free.<br /> <br />
&quot;What about neat packages I can get from a commercial provider and 
perhaps some training too?&quot; one might ask. Well, yeah if you are willing
 to pay top bucks per node for packaging bugs<a href="http://is.gd/WKBkuI"> </a> to get fixed or learn how to install packages on a virtual machine - go ahead by all means.<br /> <br />
However, keep in mind that you always can get a set of packages for Hadoop produced by another open source project called <a href="https://incubator.apache.org/bigtop/">Bigtop</a>,
 hosted by Apache. What essentially you get from it are packages for your Linux
 distro, which can be easily installed on your cluster's nodes. A great 
benefit is that you can easily trim your Hadoop stack to only include 
what you need: Hadoop + Hive, or perhaps Hadoop + HBase (which will 
automatically pick up Zookeper for you).<br /> <br />
At any rate, the best part of the story isn't a set of packages that can
 be installed: after all this is what packages are usually being created
 for, right? The problem with the packages or other forms of component 
distribution is compatibility: you don't know in advance if A-package will nicely 
work with B-package v.1.2 unless somebody has tested this assumption.
 Even then, testing environment might be significantly different from 
your production environment and then all bets are off. Unless - again - 
you're willing to pay through your nose to someone who's willing to get 
it for you. And that's where true miracle of something like BigTop is 
coming for a rescue.<br /> <br />
Before I'll explain more, I wanna step back a bit and look upon 
some recent history. A couple of years ago Yahoo's Hadoop development 
team had to address an issue of putting together working and 
well-validated Hadoop stack including a number of components developed 
by different engineering organizations with their own development 
schedule and integration criteria. The main integration point of all of 
the pieces was the operations team which was in charge of a big number of 
cluster deployments, provisioning and support. Without their own QA 
staff they were oftentimes at mercy of an assumed code or configuration 
quality coming from all the corners of the company. Even with
 a chance of the high quality of all these components there were no 
guarantees that they will work together as expected once put together on a cluster. And indeed, integration problems were many.<br /> <br />
That's were a small team of engineers including yours truly who put together
 a prototype of a system called FIT (Final Integration Testing). The 
system essentially allowed you to pick up a packaged component you wanted 
to validate against your cluster environment and perform the deployment,
 configuration, and testing with the integration scenarios provided by 
either the component's owner or your own team.<br /> <br />
The approach was so effective that the project was continued and funded 
further in the form of HIT (Hadoop Integration Testing). At which point 
two of us have left for what seemed like a greener pasture back then.<br /> <br />
We thought the idea was the real deal so we have continued on the path 
of developing a less custom and more adoptable technology based on open 
standards such as Maven and Groovy. Here you can find the <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/63012489/Big-Data-Stacks-Validation" target="_blank">slides from the talk</a>
 we gave at eBay about a year ago. The presentation is putting the 
concept of Hadoop data stack in open writing for the first time, as well as 
defines stacks customization and validation technology. When this presentation 
were given we already had <a href="http://is.gd/XvhqFW" target="_blank">well working mechanism</a> of creating, deploying, and validating both packaged and non-packaged Hadoop components.<br /> <br />
BigTop - <i>open-sourced for the second time</i> just a few months ago and 
based on our project above - has added up a packaging creation layer on 
top of the stack validation product. This, of course, makes your life 
even easier. And even more so with a number of Puppet recipes allowing 
you to deploy and configure your cluster in highly efficient and 
automatic manner. I encourage you to check it out.<br /> <br />
BigTop has been successfully used for validating release of Apache 
Hadoop 0.20.205 which has become a foundation of Hadoop 1.0.0 
Another release of Hadoop - 0.22 - was using BigTop for release 
candidates validation and so on. </p> 
  <p>On top of &quot;just packages&quot; BigTop now produces ready to go VMs pre-installed with Hadoop stack for different Linux distributions: just download one and instantiate your very own cluster in minutes! We'll tell about it next time.<br /></p> 
  <p>I encourage to check BigTop project, contribute to it your ideas, time, and knowledge!</p> 
  <p> </p> 
  <p><a href="http://is.gd/06yvPM">Cross-posted</a><br /> </p>