Apache Hadoop – Background and an Overview

MapReduce – The Paradigm

Essentially, the MapReduce model consists of a first, embarrassingly parallel, map phase where input data is split into discreet chunks to be processed. It is followed by the second and final reduce phase where the output of the map phase is aggregated to produce the desired result. The simple, and fairly restricted, nature of the programming model lends itself to very efficient and extremely large-scale implementations across thousands of cheap, commodity nodes.

Apache Hadoop MapReduce is the most popular open-source implementation of the MapReduce model.

In particular, when MapReduce is paired with a distributed file-system such as Apache Hadoop HDFS, which can provide very high aggregate I/O bandwidth across a large cluster, the economics of the system are extremely compelling – a key factor in the popularity of Hadoop.

One of the keys to this is the lack of data motion i.e. move compute to data and do not move data to the compute node via the network. Specifically, the MapReduce tasks can be scheduled on the same physical nodes on which data is resident in HDFS, which exposes the underlying storage layout across the cluster. This significantly reduces the network I/O patterns and keeps most of the I/O on the local disk or within the same rack – a core advantage.

Apache Hadoop MapReduce, circa 2011 – A Recap

Apache Hadoop MapReduce is an open-source, Apache Software Foundation project, which is an implementation of the MapReduce programming paradigm described above. Now, as someone who has spent over six years working full-time on Apache Hadoop, I normally like to point out that the Apache Hadoop MapReduce project itself can be broken down into the following major facets:

• The end-user MapReduce API for programming the desired MapReduce application.
• The MapReduce framework, which is the runtime implementation of various phases such as the map phase, the sort/shuffle/merge aggregation and the reduce phase.
• The MapReduce system, which is the backend infrastructure required to run the user’s MapReduce application, manage cluster resources, schedule thousands of concurrent jobs etc.

This separation of concerns has significant benefits, particularly for the end-users – they can completely focus on the application via the API and allow the combination of the MapReduce Framework and the MapReduce System to deal with the ugly details such as resource management, fault-tolerance, scheduling etc.

The current Apache Hadoop MapReduce System is composed of the JobTracker, which is the master, and the per-node slaves called TaskTrackers.

The JobTracker is responsible for resource management (managing the worker nodes i.e. TaskTrackers), tracking resource consumption/availability and also job life-cycle management (scheduling individual tasks of the job, tracking progress, providing fault-tolerance for tasks etc).

The TaskTracker has simple responsibilities – launch/teardown tasks on orders from the JobTracker and provide task-status information to the JobTracker periodically.

For a while, we have understood that the Apache Hadoop MapReduce framework needed an overhaul. In particular, with regards to the JobTracker, we needed to address several aspects regarding scalability, cluster utilization, ability for customers to control upgrades to the stack i.e. customer agility and equally importantly, supporting workloads other than MapReduce itself.

We’ve done running repairs over time, including recent support for JobTracker availability and resiliency to HDFS issues (both of which are available in Hortonworks Data Platform v1 i.e. HDP1) but lately they’ve come at an ever-increasing maintenance cost and yet, did not address core issues such as support for non-MapReduce and customer agility.