Hadoop Architecture

Hadoop consists of the Hadoop Common package, which provides filesystem and OS level abstractions, a MapReduce engine (either MapReduce/MR1 or YARN/MR2) and the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). The Hadoop Common package contains the necessary Java ARchive (JAR) files and scripts needed to start Hadoop. The package also provides source code, documentation, and a contribution section that includes projects from the Hadoop Community.

Hadoop Cluster

A small Hadoop cluster includes a single master and multiple worker nodes. The master node consists of a JobTracker, TaskTracker, NameNode and DataNode. A slave or worker node acts as both a DataNode and TaskTracker, though it is possible to have data-only worker nodes and compute-only worker nodes.

These are normally used only in nonstandard applications. Hadoop requires Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 1.6 or higher. The standard startup and shutdown scripts require that Secure Shell (ssh) be set up between nodes in the cluster.

In a larger cluster, the HDFS is managed through a dedicated NameNode server to host the file system index, and a secondary NameNode that can generate snapshots of the namenode's memory structures, thus preventing file-system corruption and reducing loss of data. Similarly, a standalone JobTracker server can manage job scheduling. In clusters where the Hadoop MapReduce engine is deployed against an alternate file system, the NameNode, secondary NameNode, and DataNode architecture of HDFS are replaced by the file-system-specific equivalents.

Hadoop Distributed File System

The Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS) is a distributed, scalable, and portable file-system written in Java for the Hadoop framework. A Hadoop cluster has nominally a single namenode plus a cluster of datanodes, although redundancy options are available for the namenode due to its criticality. Each datanode serves up blocks of data over the network using a block protocol specific to HDFS. The file system uses TCP/IP sockets for communication. Clients use remote procedure call (RPC) to communicate between each other.

HDFS stores large files (typically in the range of gigabytes to terabytes and petabytes) across multiple machines. It achieves reliability by replicating the data across multiple hosts, and hence theoretically does not require RAID storage on hosts (but to increase I/O performance some RAID configurations are still useful). Before continue with our discussion on HDFS let us clear our views on RAID.

What is RAID?- RAID (originally redundant array of inexpensive disks; now commonly redundant array of independent disks) is a data storage virtualization technology that combines multiple disk drive components into a logical unit for the purposes of data redundancy or performance improvement.

Data is distributed across the drives in one of several ways, referred to as RAID levels, depending on the specific level of redundancy and performance required. The different schemes or architectures are named by the word RAID followed by a number (e.g. RAID 0, RAID 1). Each scheme provides a different balance between the key goals: reliability, availability, performance, and capacity. RAID levels greater than RAID 0 provide protection against unrecoverable (sector) read errors, as well as whole disk failure.

Continuing our discussion on HDFS, with default replication value, 3, data is stored on three nodes: two on the same rack, and one on a different rack. Data nodes can talk to each other to rebalance data, to move copies around, and to keep the replication of data high. HDFS is not fully POSIX-compliant, because the requirements for a POSIX file-system differ from the target goals for a Hadoop application. The tradeoff of not having a fully POSIX-compliant file-system is increased performance for data throughput and support for non-POSIX operations such as Append.

HDFS added the high-availability capabilities, letting the main metadata server (the NameNode) fail over manually to a backup. The HDFS file system includes a so-called secondary namenode, a misleading name that some might incorrectly interpret as a backup namenode for when the primary namenode goes offline. In fact, the secondary namenode regularly connects with the primary namenode and builds snapshots of the primary namenode's directory information, which the system then saves to local or remote directories. These checkpointed images can be used to restart a failed primary namenode without having to replay the entire journal of file-system actions, then to edit the log to create an up-to-date directory structure. Because the namenode is the single point for storage and management of metadata, it can become a bottleneck for supporting a huge number of files, especially a large number of small files. HDFS Federation, a new addition, aims to tackle this problem to a certain extent by allowing multiple namespaces served by separate namenodes.

An advantage of using HDFS is data awareness between the job tracker and task tracker. The job tracker schedules map or reduce jobs to task trackers with an awareness of the data location. For example: if node A contains data (x,y,z) and node B contains data (a,b,c), the job tracker schedules node B to perform map or reduce tasks on (a,b,c) and node A would be scheduled to perform map or reduce tasks on (x,y,z). This reduces the amount of traffic that goes over the network and prevents unnecessary data transfer. When Hadoop is used with other file systems, this advantage is not always available. This can have a significant impact on job-completion times, which has been demonstrated when running data-intensive jobs.

HDFS was designed for mostly immutable files and may not be suitable for systems requiring concurrent write-operations.

HDFS can be mounted directly with a Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) virtual file system on Linux and some other Unix systems.

File access can be achieved through the native Java API, the Thrift API to generate a client in the language of the users' choosing (C++, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, Erlang, Perl, Haskell, C#, Cocoa, Smalltalk, and OCaml), the command-line interface, browsed through the HDFS-UI webapp over HTTP, or via 3rd-party network client libraries.

Other file systems:

Hadoop works directly with any distributed file system that can be mounted by the underlying operating system simply by using a file:// URL; however, this comes at a price: the loss of locality. To reduce network traffic, Hadoop needs to know which servers are closest to the data; this is information that Hadoop-specific file system bridges can provide.

List of supported file systems bundled with Apache Hadoop were:

MapReduce Engine - JobTracker and TaskTracker

Above the file systems comes the MapReduce engine, which consists of one JobTracker, to which client applications submit MapReduce jobs. The JobTracker pushes work out to available TaskTracker nodes in the cluster, striving to keep the work as close to the data as possible. With a rack-aware file system, the JobTracker knows which node contains the data, and which other machines are nearby. If the work cannot be hosted on the actual node where the data resides, priority is given to nodes in the same rack. This reduces network traffic on the main backbone network. If a TaskTracker fails or times out, that part of the job is rescheduled. The TaskTracker on each node spawns off a separate Java Virtual Machine process to prevent the TaskTracker itself from failing if the running job crashes the JVM. A heartbeat is sent from the TaskTracker to the JobTracker every few minutes to check its status. The Job Tracker and TaskTracker status and information is exposed by Jetty and can be viewed from a web browser

Known limitations of this approach are:

The allocation of work to TaskTrackers is very simple. Every TaskTracker has a number of available slots (such as "4 slots"). Every active map or reduce task takes up one slot. The Job Tracker allocates work to the tracker nearest to the data with an available slot. There is no consideration of the current system load of the allocated machine, and hence its actual availability. If one TaskTracker is very slow, it can delay the entire MapReduce job – especially towards the end of a job, where everything can end up waiting for the slowest task. With speculative execution enabled, however, a single task can be executed on multiple slave nodes.

Scheduling By default Hadoop uses FIFO, and optionally 5 scheduling priorities to schedule jobs from a work queue. In version 0.19 the job scheduler was refactored out of the JobTracker, while adding the ability to use an alternate scheduler (such as the Fair scheduler or the Capacity scheduler).