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Tag Archives: Hadoop

Ansible Book Review Part 4

14 Saturday Mar 2015

Posted by mp3monster in Book Reviews, Books, Packt, Technology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Ansible, automation, AWS, book, Chef, configuration, deployment, DigitalOcean, Docker, Hadoop, Packt, Packt Publishing, Puppet, Puppet Labs, review

This the final part of the detailed look at Packt book, Learning Ansible. As the book says in the opening to chapter 6 we’re into the back straight, into the final mile. The first of  two final  chapters look at provisioning of platforms on Amazon AWS, DigitalOcean and the use of the very hip and cool Docker plus updating your inventory of systems given that we have dynamically introduced new ones.  The approach is illustrated by not only instantiating servers but delivering a configured Hadoop cluster. As with everything else we’ve seen in Ansible there isn’t a standardised approach to all IaaS platforms as that restricts you the lowest common denominator which is contrary to Ansible goals described early on. But deploying the Hadoop elements on the two cloud IaaS providers is common.  Although the chapter is pretty short, I did have to read through this more carefully, as the book leverages a lot of demonstrated features from previous chapters (configuration arrays etc) which meant seeing the key element of the interaction with AWS was harder. It does mean if you tried diving into this chapter straight away, although not impossible does require a bit more investment from the reader to see all the value points. That said it is great to see through the use of the various features how easy to setup the provisioning in the cloud is, and the inventory update. Perhaps the win would have been to just so the simple provision and then the clever approach.

Chapter 7 focuses on Deployment. When I read this, I was a little nonplussed, hadn’t we been reading about this in the previous 6 chapters. But when you look at the definition provided:

“To position (troops) in readiness for combat, as along a front or line.”
Excerpt From: “Learning Ansible.” Packt Publishing. 

You can start to see the true target of what we’re really thinking about, which is the process of going from software build to production readiness. So having  gone through the software packaging activities you need to orchestrate the deployment across potentially multiple servers across a server farm. This orchestration piece is really just pulling together everything that has been explained before but also share some Ansible best practise. Then finally an examination of the Ansible approach for the nodes to pull deployments and updates.

The final piece of the book is an Appendix which looks at the work to bring Ansible to the Windows platform, Ansible Galaxy and Ansible Tower.  Ansible Galaxy is a repository of roles build by the Ansible community. Ansible Tower provides a web front end to the Ansible server. The Tower product is the commercial side of the Ansible company – and effectively sales here fund the full time Ansible development effort.

So to summarise …

The Learning Ansible book explains from first principles to the very rich capabilities of building packaging software, instantiating cloud servers or containers through to configuring systems and deploying applications into new environments; and then capturing instantiated system details into the Ansible inventory. How Ansible compares with the more established solutions in this space in the form of Puppet and Chef is discussed, and the pros and cons of the different tools. All the way through, the books has been written in an easy engaging manner. You might even say wonderfully written. The examples are very good with the possible exception of 2 cases (just merely good in my opinion), the examples are supported with very clear explanations that demonstrate the power of the Ansible product. Even if you choose not to use Ansible, this book does an excellent job of showing the value of not resorting to the ‘black art’ of system build and configuration and suggesting good ways to realising automation of this kind of activity, in many place undoubtedly thought provoking

Prior Review Parts:

  • Part 1
  • Part 2
  • Part 3

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Oracle Big Data Handbook – summary review

05 Monday May 2014

Posted by mp3monster in Book Reviews, Books, Oracle, Oracle Press, Technology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Big Data, Big Data Appliance, book, Endeca, Enterprise R, Hadoop, NoSQL, ODI, Oracle, Oracle Big Data Handbook, Oracle Press

Having written several detailed reviews of Oracle Press’ Oracle Big Data Handbook (links below) I thought it useful to produce a summary. Over all is a very insightful and informative book covering the range of technologies that Oracle offers to address the ‘Big Data’ space from a number of view points such hardware with the Big Data Appliance (BDA), software with NoSQL, Enterprise R and Hadoop along with the various adapters (e.g. ODI) and existing product features that existing products make available to support the big data story and contribute to make a cohesive ecosystem. The book looks beyond the technologies classically linked to the ‘Big Data’  term to explore products such as Endeca. I like the act that the book tries to explain the rational behind some of the approaches adopted and the associated value propositions. Finally book looks at governance, maturity and architectural capabilities. All of which makes for an informative and insightful book.

The book isn’t flawless a few challenges that can make the reading a little frustrating occasionally (at least for me as I went cover to cover), for example,looking at the Big Data Appliance we seem to revisit the hardware specifications multiple times. The data governance perspective is data governance not specific to big data in my opinion. Occasionally the book seems to jump about when explaining a number of related areas which means that using the book as more a reference isn’t so easy. Don’t get me wrong these issues are hugely out weighed by the value it brings.

my detailed reviews:

  • Part 1
  • Part 2
  • Part 3
Oracle Big Data Handbook

Oracle Big Data Handbook

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Oracle Big Data Handbook – part 2 reviewed

22 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by mp3monster in Book Reviews, General, Oracle, Oracle Press, Technology

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

adaptors, BDA, BerkeleyDB, Big Data, book, connectors, Hadoop, NoSQL, ODI, Oracle, Oracle Press, review, Sleepycat, sqoop

After an excellent start in Part 1 of Oracle Press’ Oracle Big Data Handbook (reviewed here). Part 2 moves on to looking at Apache Hadoop, Oracle’s Big Data Appliance and Oracle’s NoSQL offerings.

So chapter 3 provides a brilliant overview of Hadoop and the echo system that has been developed around it. Addressing the divergent versions of Map Reduce leading to the likes of YARN. Touching on how commericalised versions of Hadoop have been taken forward with this (such as Cloudera).

 

Apache Hadoop echo system

Moving onto to describe the core solution components such as Node Managers and the relationship to hardware and the use of more commodity kit rather than using nice expensive SAN technology.

Hadoop Structure

So now we have good (pretty much uncoloured by Oracle) view of Hadoop. Which leads into the the next chapter (chapter 4) which looks at why Oracle have taken the approach of an Appliance (which could be seen as contrary to the previous stated adoption of commodity kit).

Oracle Big Data

So as you can see Oracle woven together a set of technologies into an Exadata based platform which would not only deal with Big Data Analytics but ideally support other volume scenario needs so you’re not adding another data silo. all of which fits with Oracle’s Engineered Solutions view point. The book takes on a explains the other factors involved in the BDA design – those of commercial considerations and value propositions in relation to its customer base – very refreshing to see (rather than rationalisation through technical arguments alone).

The book addresses the challenge of why should I go to Oracle for big data? Which is well argued on the experience of very large relational deployments. Oracle’s contributions to Hadoop via Cloudera and so on. The chapter finishes with the argument around cost comparison between buying a comparable hardware solution to build your own cluster. Taking just list prices compared to HP and the hardware costs come in more or less the same, that’s before you account for the fact the Oracle price includes all the software.

 

Chapter 5 addresses the deployment of the BDA, explaining the configuration process, which with the combination of a tool called Mammoth (appropriate really) and the lies of Puppet seems pretty simple as a lot of the solution is preconfigured on the box ready. all of which is reasonably well explained. my only grumble is that we do seem to revisit the details of the hardware fairly regularly as the details are again presented here, although we go into a deeper dive in the configuration. One surprise that I’d not picked up on is that Oracle have made their NoSQL solution available as open source, although a little digging might contribute to why as it has links back to Sleepycat’s BerkeleyDB that Oracle acquired (more here). As the chapter move through the physical aspects of the deployment it also highlights in clear terms any constraints Oracle imposes to ensure that the whole appliance is supportable, the most significant of these areas is the advanced networking that is setup.

Chapter 5 as it moves through deployment considerations addresses the means to know that the appliance is running properly – so we’re talking about system monitoring not just of the hardware but the distributed nature of Hadoop and Map Reduce. So a brief view of the products deployed is given. Obviously this centres on the Enterprise Manager extensions, but also the component level tooling such as Cloudera’s Hadoop Manager.

Chapter 6 in many respects continues building out the view of Hadoop to describe briefly the analytics tooling both in the Oracle RDBMS, R language and data mining/discovery of Endeca. The interesting points in the chapter are about the relationship with RDBMS particularly as an enterprise data warehouse – something I’ve not seen really addressed elsewhere as the common world view seems to put Hadoop in the same camp as NoSQL which seems to be gaining the zeal and polarity that Linux vs Windows used to have when it comes to RDBMS. But I think the book makes a good case for right tool for the right job.

Oracle’s Strategic Product View

Chapter 7 starts to drill in to how the connector package offers which consider Oracle database data transfer, combining the R language with MapReduce and ODI.

The database connector aim to provide efficiency in transferring data between Hadoop and the Oracle RDBMS over say using Sqoop to transfer data to and from an Oracle database (ODI connectors, JDBC, direct OCI etc). To fully understand the explanation of how this works you do need to understand the basics of MapReduce although as the chapter progresses the relevant MapReduce operations are elaborated upon. As the chapter progresses we start being shown configuration fragments for the different connection approaches.

The final chapter of this section of the book looks at the NoSQL database in detail, starting with high level ideas such as how NoSQL relates to ACID and BASE ideas, dropping down into significant (but valuable) detail by describing how clients are kept in sync through the use of separate threads picking up data about the data partitioning (sharding).  Once the key components have been well described the chapter moves onto explain how Oracle has optimized the process to make the NoSQL as performant as is possible whilst providing a solution that is elastic in nature and highly resilient but still predictable in its dynamics.

The chapter finishes off with considerations such as installation, how it integrates with Hadoop and OBIEE.

Overall, this a very informative chapter, occasionally it feels like some of the information is being repeated but in a different structure but it isn’t the end of the world, although if you’re reading from cover to cover you need to just press on.

 

Part 1 of the book is reviewed here.

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