What is Resilient Distributed Datasets (RDDs) ? (Day 3)

Spark’s primary core abstraction is called Resilient Distributed Dataset or RDD.It is designed to support in-memory data storage, distributed across a cluster in a manner that is Resilient,fault-tolerant and efficient. RDD are Resilient as it relies on lineage graph , whenever there is  a failure in system, they can recompute themselves using the prior information. Similarly Fault-tolerance is achieved, in part, by tracking the lineage of transformations applied to coarse grained sets of data. Efficiency is achieved through parallelization of processing across multiple nodes in the cluster, and minimization of data replication between those nodes.

“In a layman language, you can RDD is representation of the data that’s coming into your system in an object format & allows you to do computation on it.”

Spark RDD’s can reference to a dataset in an external storage system, such as a shared filesystem, HDFS, HBase, or any data source offering a Hadoop InputFormat. Also we can define it as, just a distributed collection of elements that is parallelized across the cluster. Once data is loaded into an RDD, two basic types of operation can be carried out.. Transformations and Actions.

Transformations are those that do not return a value. In fact, nothing is evaluated during the definition of these transformation statements. It just creates a new RDD by changing the original through processes such as mapping, filtering, and more. The fault tolerance aspect of RDDs allows Spark to reconstruct the transformations used to build the lineage to get back the lost data.

Actions are when the transformations get evaluated along with the action that is called for that RDD. Actions return values. For example, you can do a count on a RDD, to get the number of elements within and that value is returned.

The original RDD remains unchanged throughout. The chain of transformations from RDD1 to RDDn are logged, and can be repeated in the event of data loss or the failure of a cluster node.RDDs can be persistent in order to cache a dataset in memory across operations. This allows future actions to be much faster, by as much as ten times.

Spark’s cache is fault-tolerant in that if any partition of an RDD is lost, it will automatically be recomputed by using the original transformations. For example, let’s say a node goes offline. All it needs to do when it comes back online is to re-evaluate the graph to where it left off. Caching is provided with Spark to enable the processing to happen in memory. If it does not fit in memory, it will spill to disk.

Interesting thing about Spark is , it’s lazy evaluation.  This is because RDD are not loaded into system as in when the system encounters an RDD , but only done when an Action is supposed to be performed. So to understand this concept, lets take an example:

• We read a text file and load the data into new created RDD ‘m’   {scala>  val m=sc.textfile (“abc.txt”)  } . This step is interpreted by Spark and an DAG is created that tells it to read data from file and push it in RDD format. An RDD is made of multiple partitions. By default, the minimum # of partitions in an RDD will be two. However, this is customizable and will be different in vendor distributions of Spark. For example, when creating an RDD out of an HDFS file, each block in the file feeds one RDD partition, so a file with 30 unique blocks will create an RDD with 30 partitions. Or in Cassandra, every 100,000 rows get loaded into one RDD partition. So, a Cassandra table with 1 million rows will generate an RDD with 10 partitions.
• Next step is to display the first item in this RDD,  {scala>  m.first() }
• Now lets use the .filter() transformation on the ‘m‘ RDD to return a new RDD named “linesWithApache“, which will contain a subset of the items in the file (only the ones containing the string “Apache”: {scala> val linesWithApache = m.filter(line => line.contains(“Apache”))}
• Now lets use an Action to find no. of lines with Apache word.  {scala> linesWithApache.count()}
• To further see these lines, you can use .collect()  Action.  {scala> linesWithApache.collect()  }

Learn How Spark actually works? Click here

 

Spark Components..Architecture (Day 2)

So here we are today…in Day 2  tutorial for Spark learning. As we all know, that Spark is a top-level project of the Apache Software Foundation, designed to be used with a range of programming languages and on a variety of architectures. Spark’s speed, simplicity, and broad support for existing development environments and storage systems make it increasingly popular with a wide range of developers, and relatively accessible to those learning to work with it for the first time.

To learn Spark easily and incorporate into existing applications as straightforwardly as possible., its developed to support many programming languages like Java, Python, Scala, SQL & R. Spark is easy to download and install on a laptop or virtual machine. Spark was built to be able to run in a couple different ways: standalone, or part of a cluster.For production workloads that are operating at scale, Spark will require to run on an big data cluster. These clusters are often also used for Hadoop jobs, and Hadoop’s YARN resource manager will generally be used to manage that Hadoop cluster (including Spark).  Spark can also run just as easily on clusters controlled by Apache Mesos.A series of scripts bundled with current releases of Spark simplify the process of launching Spark on Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

(source:internet)

The Spark architecture or stack currently is comprised of Spark Core and four libraries that are optimized to address the requirements of four different use cases.Individual applications will typically require Spark Core and at least one of these libraries.

What are Spark Components?

Spark core: Its is a general-purpose system providing basic functionality like task scheduling, distributing,fault recovery, interacting with storage systems and monitoring of the applications across a cluster. Spark Core is also home to the API that defines resilient distributed datasets (RDDs), which is Spark’s main programming abstraction.

Then you have the components on top of the core that are designed to interoperate closely.Benefit of such a stack is that all the higher layer components will inherit the improvements made at the lower layers. Example: Optimization to the Spark Core will speed up the SQL, the streaming, the machine learning and the graph processing libraries as well.

1. Spark Streaming : This module enables scalable and fault-tolerant processing of streaming data, and can integrate with established sources of data streams like Flume. Examples of data streams include log files generated by production web servers, or queues of messages containing status updates posted by users of a web service.
2. Spark SQL: This module is for working with structured data. It allows querying data via SQL as well as the Apache Hive variant of SQL—called the Hive Query Language (HQL)—and it supports many sources of data, including Hive tables, Parquet, and JSON.Spark SQL also supports JDBC and ODBC connections, enabling a degree of integration with existing databases, data warehouses and business intelligence tools.
3. GRaphX : It supports analysis of and computation over graphs of data (e.g., a social network’s friend graph) and performing graph-parallel computations. Like Spark Streaming and Spark SQL, it also extends the Spark RDD API, allowing us to create a directed graph with arbitrary properties attached to each vertex and edge. It provides various operators for manipulating graphs (e.g., subgraph and mapVertices) and a library of common graph algorithms (e.g., PageRank and triangle counting).
4. Spark Mlib : Spark comes with a library containing common machine learning (ML) functionality, called MLlib. It provides multiple types of machine learning algorithms, including classification, regression, clustering, and collaborative filtering, as well as supporting functionality such as model evaluation and data import.

What is Resilient Distributed Datasets (RDDs)? Click here to learn Day 3 tutorial 🙂

What is Spark..is it replacing Hadoop ? (Day1)

Spark Framework is a simple Java web framework built for fast computation. It is a free and open-source software  & an alternative to other Java web application frameworks such as JAX-RS and Spring MVC. It was started in 2009 at Berkeley.

Overview:

To define, Spark is a cluster-computing framework, which means that it competes more with MapReduce than with the entire Hadoop ecosystem. It actually extends MR model to support more computation ways like interactive/iterative algos, queries, stream processing, graph processing etc. It is designed to be highly accessible, offering simple API in languages like Python, Java, Scala & SQL.One of the main features Spark offers for speed is the ability to run computations in memory, but the system is also more efficient than MapReduce for complex applications running on disk.

Is Spark a Hadoop module?

We see Spark is listed as a module on Hadoop’s project page, but Spark also has its own page because, while it can run in Hadoop clusters through YARN, it also has a standalone mode. So Spark is independent. By default there is no storage mechanism in Spark, so to store data, need fast and scalable file system. Hence uses S3 or HDFS or any other file system, but if you use Hadoop it’s very low cost.

Spark runs on Hadoop, Mesos, standalone, or in the cloud. It can access diverse data sources including HDFS, Cassandra, HBase, and S3. You can run Spark using its standalone cluster mode, on EC2, on Hadoop YARN, or on Apache Mesos. However, as time goes on, some big data scientists expect Spark to diverge and perhaps replace Hadoop, especially in instances where faster access to processed data is critical.

(Source: Internet)

Hadoop vs Spark

A direct comparison of Hadoop and Spark is difficult because they do many of the same things, but are also non-overlapping in some areas.The most important thing to remember about Hadoop and Spark is that their use is not an either-or scenario because they are not mutually exclusive. Nor is one necessarily a drop-in replacement for the other. The two are compatible with each other and that makes their pairing an extremely powerful solution for a variety of big data applications.So we can compare them on some below points:

1. Data Processing Engine/Operators: Hadoop originally was designed to handle crawling and searching billions of web pages and collecting their information into a database. For this it uses Map reduce,which is a batch-processing engine. MapReduce operates in sequential steps by reading data from the cluster, performing its operation on the data, writing the results back to the cluster, reading updated data from the cluster, performing the next data operation, writing those results back to the cluster and so on. But Spark is a cluster-computing framework,Which performs similar operations, but it does so in a single step and in memory. It reads data from the cluster, performs its operation (Filter/map/join/groupby) on the data, and then writes it back to the cluster.
2. File System: Spark has no file management and therefor must rely on Hadoop’s Distributed File System (HDFS) or some other solution like S3, Tachyon.
3. Speed/Performance: Spark’s in-memory processing admit that Spark is very fast (Up to 100 times faster than Hadoop MapReduce), Spark can also perform batch processing, however, it really excels at streaming workloads, interactive queries, and machine-based learning.The reason that Spark is so fast is that it processes everything in memory. Yes, it can also use disk for data that doesn’t all fit into memory.Spark uses memory and can use disk for processing, whereas MapReduce is strictly disk-based. Example: Internet of Things sensors, log monitoring, security analytics all require Spark for faster computation.
4. Storage: MapReduce uses persistent storage and Spark uses Resilient Distributed Datasets (RDDs)
5. Ease of Use: Spark is well known for its performance, but it’s also somewhat well known for its ease of use in that it comes with user-friendly APIs for Scala (its native language), Java, Python, and Spark SQL.Spark has an interactive mode so that developers and users can run queries.MapReduce has no interactive mode, but add-ons such as Hive and Pig  to make working with MapReduce a little easier for developers.
6. Costs :Both MapReduce and Spark are Apache projects, which means that they’re open source and free software products. While there’s no cost for the software, there are costs associated with running either platform in personnel and in hardware. Both products are designed to run on commodity hardware, such as low cost, so-called white box server systems. However Spark systems cost more because of the large amounts of RAM required to run everything in memory. But what’s also true is that Spark’s technology reduces the number of required systems. So, you have significantly fewer systems that cost more. There’s probably a point at which Spark actually reduces costs per unit of computation even with the additional RAM requirement.
7. API’s: Spark also includes its own graph computation library, GraphX. GraphX allows users to view the same data as graphs and as collections. Users can also transform and join graphs with Resilient Distributed Datasets (RDDs).
8. Fault Tolerance: Hadoop uses Replicated blocks of data to maintain this feature. There is a link between TaskTrackers & JobTracker, so if its missed then the JobTracker reschedules all pending and in-progress operations to another TaskTracker. This effectively provides fault tolerance.Spark uses Resilient Distributed Datasets (RDDs), which are fault-tolerant collections of elements that can be operated on in parallel. RDDs can reference a dataset in an external storage system, such as a shared filesystem, HDFS, HBase, or any data source offering a Hadoop InputFormat. Spark can create RDDs from any storage source supported by Hadoop, including local filesystems or one of those listed previously.
9. Scalability: both MapReduce and Spark are scalable using the HDFS.
10. Security: Hadoop supports Kerberos authentication. HDFS supports access control lists (ACLs) and a traditional file permissions model. For user control in job submission, Hadoop provides Service Level Authorization, which ensures that clients have the right permissions.Spark’s security is a bit sparse by currently only supporting authentication via shared secret (password authentication). The security bonus that Spark can enjoy is that if you run Spark on HDFS, it can use HDFS ACLs and file-level permissions. Additionally, Spark can run on YARN giving it the capability of using Kerberos authentication.

Learn Spark Architecture by clicking here.

Hadoop Ecosystem Components contd…(Tutorial Day 6)

So continuing the old post, here we will discuss some more components of Hadoop ecosystem.

Data Integration or ETL Components of Hadoop Ecosystem

• Sqoop

Sqoop (SQL-to-Hadoop) is a big data tool that offers the capability to extract bulk data from non-Hadoop  or relational databases (like MySQL, Oracle,Teradata, Postgre) , transform the data into a form usable by Hadoop, and then load the data into HDFS, Hbase or Hive also. This process is similar to Extract, Transform, and Load.It parallelizes data transfer for fast performance, copies data quickly from external system to Hadoop & makes data analysis more efficient.

It’s batch oriented and not suitable for low latency interactive queries. It provides a scalable processing environment for both structured and non-structured data.

Sqoop Import

The import tool imports individual tables from RDBMS to HDFS. Each row in a table is treated as a record in HDFS. All records are stored as text data in text files or as binary data in Avro and Sequence files.

Sqoop Export

The export tool exports a set of files from HDFS back to an RDBMS. The files given as input to Sqoop contain records, which are called as rows in table. Those are read and parsed into a set of records and delimited with user-specified delimiter.

Sqoop Use Case-

Coupons.com , Apollo Group uses Sqoop component of the Hadoop ecosystem to enable transmission of data between Hadoop & data warehouse .

• Flume-

Apache Flume is a distributed, reliable, and available service for efficiently collecting, aggregating, and moving large amounts of streaming or log files data into the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS).  It is used for collecting data from its origin and sending it back to the resting location (HDFS).Flume accomplishes this by outlining data flows that consist of 3 primary structures channels, sources and sinks. The processes that run the dataflow with flume are known as agents and the bits of data that flow via flume are known as events.

Flume helps to collect data from a variety of sources, like logs, jms, Directory etc.
Multiple flume agents can be configured to collect high volume of data.
It scales horizontally & is stream oriented.It provides high throughput and low latency.It is fault tolerant.

Both Sqoop and Flume, pull the data from the source and push it to the sink. The main difference is Flume is event driven, while Sqoop is not.

Flume Use Case –

Twitter source connects through the streaming API and continuously downloads the tweets (called as events). These tweets are converted into JSON format and sent to the downstream Flume sinks for further analysis of tweets and retweets to engage users on Twitter.

Goibibo uses Flume to transfer logs from production system to HDFS.

Data Storage Component of Hadoop Ecosystem

HBase

Hbase is an open source, distributed, sorted map model.Its a column store-based NoSQL database solution & is similar to Google’s BigTable framework.It supports random reads and also batch computations using MapReduce. With HBase NoSQL database enterprise can create large tables with millions of rows and columns on hardware machine. The best practice to use HBase is when there is a requirement for random ‘read or write’ access to big datasets. HBase’s important advantage is that it supports updates on larger tables and faster lookup. The HBase data store supports linear and modular scaling. HBase stores data as a multidimensional map and is distributed. HBase operations are all MapReduce tasks that run in a parallel manner.

Its well integrated with Pig/Hive/Sqoop. It is consistent and partition tolerant system in CAP theorem.

HBase Use Case-

Facebook is one the largest users of HBase with its messaging platform built on top of HBase in 2010.

Cassandra

Apache Cassandra is a free and open-source distributed database management system designed to handle large amounts of data across many commodity servers.This database is the right choice when you need scalability and high availability without compromising performance. Linear scalability and proven fault-tolerance on commodity hardware or cloud infrastructure make it the perfect platform for mission-critical data.Cassandra’s support for replicating across multiple data-centers is best-in-class, providing lower latency for your users and the peace of mind of knowing that you can survive regional outages.

Use Cases:

For Cassandra, Twitter is an excellent example. We know that, like most sites, user information (screen name, password, email address, etc), is kept for everyone and that those entries are linked to one another to map friends and followers. And, it wouldn’t be Twitter if it weren’t storing tweets, which in addition to the 140 characters of text are also associated with meta-data like timestamp and the unique id that we see in the URLs.

Monitoring, Management and Orchestration Components of Hadoop Ecosystem- Oozie and Zookeeper

• Oozie-

Oozie is a workflow scheduler where the workflows are expressed as Directed Acyclic Graphs. Oozie runs in a Java servlet container Tomcat and makes use of a database to store all the running workflow instances, their states ad variables along with the workflow definitions to manage Hadoop jobs (MapReduce, Sqoop, Pig and Hive).The workflows in Oozie are executed based on data and time dependencies.

Oozie Use Case:

The American video game publisher Riot Games uses Hadoop and the open source tool Oozie to understand  the player experience.

• Zookeeper-

Zookeeper is the king of coordination and provides simple, fast, reliable and ordered operational services for a Hadoop cluster. Zookeeper is responsible for synchronization service, distributed configuration service and for providing a naming registry for distributed systems.

Zookeeper Use Case-

Found by Elastic uses Zookeeper comprehensively for resource allocation, leader election, high priority notifications and discovery. The entire service of Found built up of various systems that read and write to   Zookeeper.

Here is the recorded session from the IBM Certified Hadoop Developer Course at DeZyre about the components of Hadoop Ecosystem –
Several other common Hadoop ecosystem components include: Avro, Cassandra, Chukwa, Mahout, HCatalog, Ambari and Hama. By implementing Hadoop using one or more of the Hadoop ecosystem components, users can personalize their big data experience to meet the changing business requirements. The demand for big data analytics will make the elephant stay in the big data room for quite some time.

Data Serialisation (Data Interchange Protocols)

AVRO: Apache Avro is a language-neutral data serialization system, developed by  Apache Hadoop.Data serialization is a mechanism to translate data in computer environment (like memory buffer, data structures or object state) into binary or textual form that can be transported over network or stored in some persistent storage media.Java and Hadoop provides serialization APIs, which are java based, but Avro is not only language independent but also it is schema-based.Once the data is transported over network or retrieved from the persistent storage, it needs to be deserialized again. Serialization is termed as marshalling and deserialization is termed as unmarshalling.

Avro uses JSON format to declare the data structures. Presently, it supports languages such as Java, C, C++, C#, Python, and Ruby.Avro has a schema-based system. A language-independent schema is associated with its read and write operations.

Like Avro, there are other serialization mechanisms in Hadoop such as Sequence Files, Protocol Buffers, and Thrift.Avro creates a self-describing file named Avro Data File, in which it stores data along with its schema in the metadata section.Avro is also used in Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs). During RPC, client and server exchange schemas in the connection handshake.

To serialize Hadoop data, there are two ways −

• You can use the Writable classes, provided by Hadoop’s native library.
• You can also use Sequence Files which store the data in binary format.

The main drawback of these two mechanisms is that Writables and SequenceFiles have only a Java API and they cannot be written or read in any other language.

Therefore any of the files created in Hadoop with above two mechanisms cannot be read by any other third language, which makes Hadoop as a limited box. To address this drawback, Doug Cutting created Avro, which is a language independent data structure.

Use Case:

Content credit : http://www.tutorialspoint.com

Avro provides rich data structures. For example, you can create a record that contains an array, an enumerated type, and a sub record. These datatypes can be created in any language, can be processed in Hadoop, and the results can be fed to a third language.

 

 Thrift :

Thrift is a lightweight, language-independent software stack with an associated code generation mechanism for RPC. Thrift provides clean abstractions for data transport, data serialization, and application level processing. Thrift was originally developed by Facebook and now it is open sourced as an Apache project. Apache Thrift is a set of code-generation tools that allows developers to build RPC clients and servers by just defining the data types and service interfaces in a simple definition file. Given this file as an input, code is generated to build RPC clients and servers that communicate seamlessly across programming languages.

Thrift supports a variety of languages including C++, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby.

To learn more on Hadoop…keep on reading these tutorials…every day we try to get something new and interesting for all my readers !!

Now we will start learning all Ecosystem components in more detail. Click here to read about how MapReduce Algorithm works with an easy example.

Hadoop Ecosystem Components contd…(Tutorial Day 5)

So continuing the old post, vendors that provide Hadoop-based platforms include Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR, Greenplum, IBM, and Amazon. Here we will discuss more components of Hadoop ecosystem.

Data Access Components of Hadoop Ecosystem

• Pig-

Apache Pig is a high-level platform for creating programs that run on Apache Hadoop. Apache Pig is a tool developed by Yahoo for analyzing huge data sets efficiently and easily. The high level data flow language for this platform is called Pig Latin. Pig can execute its Hadoop jobs in MapReduce, Apache Tez, or Apache Spark. The salient property of Pig programs is that their structure is amenable to substantial parallelization, which in turns enables them to handle very large data sets.

At the present time, Pig’s infrastructure layer consists of a compiler that produces sequences of Map-Reduce programs, for which large-scale parallel implementations already exist (e.g., the Hadoop subproject). Pig’s language layer currently consists of a textual language called Pig Latin.Pig is an open source project under the Apache Software Foundation, so you can learn about it online

Pig Latin is basically used it to construct dataflows, to have a scheduled job to periodically crunch the massive data from HDFS and transfer the summarized data into a relational database for reporting, & ad-hoc analyses. Hive is used for simple ad-hoc analytical queries for the data in HDFS, as Hive queries are a lot faster to write for those types of queries. Its generally used by Yahoo, Twitter etc to process web logs,images,maps etc.

Usage of Apache Pig:

• Using Pig Latin, programmers can perform MapReduce tasks easily without having to type complex codes in Java, as it uses multi-query approach, thereby reducing the length of codes. For example, an operation that would require you to type 200 lines of code (LoC) in Java can be easily done by typing as less as just 10 LoC in Apache Pig. Ultimately Apache Pig reduces the development time by almost 16 times.
• Pig Latin is SQL-like language and it is easy to learn Apache Pig when you are familiar with SQL.
• Apache Pig provides many built-in operators to support data operations like joins, filters, ordering, etc. In addition, it also provides nested data types like tuples, bags, and maps that are missing from MapReduce.

Pig Use Case-

I am hereby using one of my fav use case of PIG Latin language, you can read here on Slideshare:

Scenario: You have a User data in one file ,website data in another. Now you want to find out the top 5 most visited pages by users of Age (18-25). For this scenario, MAp reduce program is full page length code, but in PIG Latin language its a small easily understandable code.

Code credit: Nick Dimiduk

• Hive-

Hive is a Data warehouse system layer built on Hadoop. It allows to define a structure for unstructured big data and query the data using a SQL-like language called HiveQL. Its developed by Facebook & makes querying faster through indexing.

Hive Use Case-

Hive simplifies Hadoop at Facebook with the execution of 7500+ Hive jobs daily for Ad-hoc analysis, reporting and machine learning.

 

Read my next blog on more Hadoop ecosystem components (tutorial Day 6)