Cloudera Administration Handbook

The book describes most of the procedures needed for a cluster manager/DBA to install and maintain a CDH5 cluster.However, it gives the detailed steps for how to do things with Cloudera manager, without getting any deeper and trying to explain what happens behind the scenes.If you're already familiar with Hadoop internals and want a quick reference about maintaining CDH5 cluster then this book is for you. If you want to really learn about Hadoop and how it works then you should search somewhere else.

This book is a rapid and useful introduction to the use of Apache Hadoop to analyse huge data sets. But the central assumption is that you are not necessarily a data scientist per se, but an administrator of a Hadoop system. So the text really treads lightly if at all on the intricacies of data analysis. Instead, the merits of what Cloudera offers are explained.Top level material is covered, including building a cluster and installing and if needed upgrading Hadoop on it. Very tightly related to this is running MapReduce, which is the analysis engine optimised for a Hadoop cluster. The demands are specialised enough that ancillary processes [daemons] are needed. Like a job tracker program, giving information about scheduling of jobs, a status of the hardware in the cluster, and what jobs are currently running. If you have ever been system administrator of a computer cluster, especially a unix cluster, you may have seen similar programs, albeit on a smaller scale of disks.A key advantage of this book is a joint education in Hadoop and MapReduce. The point about running a Hadoop cluster is that often you then run MapReduce on it. Where Cloudera comes into play is in the simplification of the Hadoop administration. But not all the software described in the book is free. Cloudera has a Manager program in two versions - Standard, which is free, and Enterprise, which is not. Standard looks pretty good actually. But the text encourages you to carefully contemplate splurging on Enterprise. Arguing essentially that its extra features are worth the cost. You should read the text slowly to see if you concur. As an inducement, at least when the book was written, the Enterprise version has 60 days free use. This could still be valid when you read the book.

While it is pretty good at the bulk of the Cloudera management suite, it does miss the mark on some key factors - specifically Kerberos. Granted, official Cloudera documentation is woefully inadequate, this book only brings up other issues with nothing to bridge the two. It gives simple instructions which are accurate (i.e. Hive, etc...), however it gives no detail as to how the given service works - which may not be the point of the book, but it would help.

The Cloudera Administration Handbook written by Rohit Menon is a fantastic resource for anybody wanting to understand and manage a Cloudera platform.I have to admit that I’m a rookie and that this book was exactly what I was dreaming of. Having all information in the same place, and code example both for Linux and Windows.The book is mainly targeted at bid data expert and system administrator. The first three chapters are giving the minimum background to understand MapReduce, Hadoop and Yarn and the Cloudera's Distribution Including Apache Hadoop (all services are listed and explained).Then, you enter into the “hard part”. Chapter 4 discussing in details HDFS Federation and Its High Availability and chapter 7 describing “Managing an Apache Hadoop Cluster” were for me particularly valuable. The chapter 5 presenting Cloudera Manager, a web-browser-based administration tool to manage Apache Hadoop clusters, will show you how to manage the clusters with point and clicks instead of command lines. Chapter 6 is about configuring access and right using the Kerberos services. It does show you how to implement the security services, but not how to manage user rights, which is a step requiring some planning. Monitoring and backup (using the Hadoop utility DistCp and the Cloudera manager). are also presented in two distinct parts.What I like in this book is that it goes directly to the point, assuming you already know the basics of system administration and distributed architecture. It then shares many “tips” that only an experienced professional will know, and enables the rookie I was to avoid mistakes. With this book, you will gain time. For example, the author told you when a SPOF (single point of failure) exist and the solutions to avoid them.The only part of the book that was missing for me was the cloud deployment. I would have liked a chapter explaining how to setup Cloudera in the cloud, and get the code (puppet or chef) to automate the install.It is clearly a worth buying book for people wanting to setup and deploy correctly a Cloudera platform. I also like the fact that for the same price you can download the PDF, mobi, epub and kindle version.