[HADOOP-4117] Improve configurability of Hadoop EC2 instances

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 0.19.0
• Component/s: contrib/cloud
• Hadoop Flags: Reviewed

Release Note

Changed scripts to pass initialization script for EC2 instances at boot time (as EC2 user data) rather than embedding initialization information in the EC2 image. This change makes it easy to customize the hadoop-site.xml file for your cluster before launch, by editing the hadoop-ec2-init-remote.sh script, or by setting the environment variable USER_DATA_FILE in hadoop-ec2-env.sh to run a script of your choice.

• Assignee: Thomas White
• Reporter: Thomas White
• Created: 08/Sep/08 17:11
• Updated: 20/Nov/08 23:38
• Resolved: 18/Sep/08 09:53

Description

Currently hadoop-site.xml for EC2 instances is stored as a part of the image and only a few properties can be controlled from the user scripts (compression, number of map/reduce tasks). Furthermore, it is not possible to rsync the configuration around the EC2 cluster with the current image, so the only way to customize the hadoop-site.xml file is to rebuild the image, which is time-consuming.

It would be much better to pass the initialization script for nodes at boot time, so that it is easy to edit the configuration before starting a cluster.