What is Apache Ambari?
It provides a highly interactive dashboard which allows the administrators to visualize the progress and status of every application running over the Hadoop cluster.
Its flexible and scalable user-interface allows a range of tools such as Pig, MapReduce, Hive, etc., to be installed on the cluster and administers their performances in a user-friendly fashion. Some of the key features of this technology can be highlighted as:
- Instantaneous insight into the health of Hadoop cluster using pre-configured operational metrics
- User-friendly configuration providing an easy step-by-step guide for installation
- Dependencies and performances monitored by visualizing and analyzing jobs and tasks
- Authentication, authorization and auditing by installing Kerberos-based Hadoop clusters
- Flexible and adaptive technology fitting perfectly in the enterprise environment.
How is Ambari different from ZooKeeper?
This description may confuse you as ZooKeeper performs the similar kind of tasks. But, there is a huge difference between the tasks performed by these two technologies if looked closely. Following comparison will give you a clearer idea:
Basis of Difference | Apache Ambari | Apache ZooKeeper |
Basic Task | Monitoring, provisioning and managing Hadoop cluster | Maintaining configuration information, naming and synchronizing the cluster. |
Nature | Web interface | Open-source server |
Status maintenance | Status maintained through APIs | Status maintained through znodes |
Therefore these tasks may seem similar from a bird’s eye-view but actually these two technologies perform different tasks on the same Hadoop cluster making it agile, responsive, scalable and fault-tolerant in a big way.
How Apache Ambari came into existence?
The genesis of Apache Ambari traces the emergence of Hadoop when its distributed and scalable computing took the world by storm. More and more technologies were incorporated in the existing infrastructure. Gradually Hadoop matured and it became difficult for the cluster to maintain multiple nodes and applications simultaneously. That is when this technology came into picture to make distributed computing easier.
Currently it is one of the leading projects running under Apache Software Foundation.
Apache Ambari architecture
Ambari provides intuitive and REST APIs that automate the operations in the Hadoop cluster. It is consistent and secure interface allows it to be fairly efficient in operational control. It is an easy and user-friendly interface that efficiently diagnoses the health of Hadoop cluster using an interactive dashboard.
Basically its architecture is quite simple containing only two major components-Ambari Server and Ambari Agent. Ambari server is an authoritative process that communicates with the agents that are installed on each node on the cluster. It contains an instance of postgres database that handles all the metadata. On the other hand Ambari agents are the active member that sends the health status of every node along with diverse operational metrics. The next course of action is decided by the mater process only which is then followed by the agents.
This technology is preferred by the big data developers as it is quite handy and comes with a step-by-step guide allowing easy installation on the Hadoop cluster. Its pre-configured key operational metrics provide quick look into the health of Hadoop core, i.e., HDFS and MapReduce along with the additional components such as Hive, HBase, HCatalog, etc. Ambari sets up a centralized security system by incorporating Kerberos and Apache Ranger into the architecture. The RESTful APIs monitor the information as well as integrate the operational tools. Its user-friendliness and interactivity has brought it in the range of top ten open source technologies for Hadoop cluster.
Scope of Apache Ambari
Apache Ambari has seen tremendous growth over the last year gaining immense popularity among the existing big data technologies. Bigger companies are increasingly turning towards this technology to manage their huge clusters in a better fashion which made it spiral upwards in the technology pecking order in 2016.
Big data innovators like Hortonworks are working on Ambari to make it more scalable to support more than 2000 or 3000 nodes seamlessly. Hortonworks recently released the latest version of Ambari 2.4 aiming at simplifying the Hadoop cluster by reducing the troubleshooting time, improving operational efficiency, gaining more visibility, etc. Definitely there is much more to come in this technology in the near future.
Who should learn Apache Ambari?
- Hadoop administrators
- Database professionals
- Mainframe and Hadoop testing professionals
- DevOps Professionals
How will Apache Ambari help in your career growth?
With the increasing popularity of big data and analytics, the professionals having a good grasp of Ambari or the related technologies have the greater possibility to grab the lucrative career opportunities in this area. From the below mentioned graph, it is clearly visible that the daily rate of jobs available for the professionals of this technology has increased dynamically over the last three months.
Therefore learning Ambari will certainly be a good choice for building career as there will be a huge skill gap going to be formed in the coming years and having knowledge in the proper technology will be your token for success.
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