Exam Sections and Blueprint

1. HDFS (17%)

• Describe the function of HDFS daemons
• Describe the normal operation of an Apache Hadoop cluster, both in data storage and in data processing
• Identify current features of computing systems that motivate a system like Apache Hadoop
• Classify major goals of HDFS Design
• Given a scenario, identify appropriate use case for HDFS Federation
• Identify components and daemon of an HDFS HA-Quorum cluster
• Analyze the role of HDFS security (Kerberos)
• Determine the best data serialization choice for a given scenario
• Describe file read and write paths
• Identify the commands to manipulate files in the Hadoop File System Shell

2. YARN and MapReduce version 2 (MRv2) (17%)

• Understand how upgrading a cluster from Hadoop 1 to Hadoop 2 affects cluster settings
• Understand how to deploy MapReduce v2 (MRv2 / YARN), including all YARN daemons
• Understand basic design strategy for MapReduce v2 (MRv2)
• Determine how YARN handles resource allocations
• Identify the workflow of MapReduce job running on YARN
• Determine which files you must change and how in order to migrate a cluster from MapReduce version 1 (MRv1) to MapReduce version 2 (MRv2) running on YARN

3. Hadoop Cluster Planning (16%)

• Principal points to consider in choosing the hardware and operating systems to host an Apache Hadoop cluster
• Analyze the choices in selecting an OS
• Understand kernel tuning and disk swapping
• Given a scenario and workload pattern, identify a hardware configuration appropriate to the scenario
• Given a scenario, determine the ecosystem components your cluster needs to run in order to fulfill the SLA
• Cluster sizing: given a scenario and frequency of execution, identify the specifics for the workload, including CPU, memory, storage, disk I/O
• Disk Sizing and Configuration, including JBOD versus RAID, SANs, virtualization, and disk sizing requirements in a cluster
• Network Topologies: understand network usage in Hadoop (for both HDFS and MapReduce) and propose or identify key network design components for a given scenario

4. Hadoop Cluster Installation and Administration (25%)

• Given a scenario, identify how the cluster will handle disk and machine failures
• Analyze a logging configuration and logging configuration file format
• Understand the basics of Hadoop metrics and cluster health monitoring
• Identify the function and purpose of available tools for cluster monitoring
• Be able to install all the ecoystme components in CDH 5, including (but not limited to): Impala, Flume, Oozie, Hue, Cloudera Manager, Sqoop, Hive, and Pig
• Identify the function and purpose of available tools for managing the Apache Hadoop file system

5. Resource Management (10%)

• Understand the overall design goals of each of Hadoop schedulers
• Given a scenario, determine how the FIFO Scheduler allocates cluster resources
• Given a scenario, determine how the Fair Scheduler allocates cluster resources under YARN
• Given a scenario, determine how the Capacity Scheduler allocates cluster resources

6. Monitoring and Logging (15%)

• Understand the functions and features of Hadoop’s metric collection abilities
• Analyze the NameNode and JobTracker Web UIs
• Understand how to monitor cluster daemons
• Identify and monitor CPU usage on master nodes
• Describe how to monitor swap and memory allocation on all nodes
• Identify how to view and manage Hadoop’s log files
• Interpret a log file