This chapter covered how to build, maintain, and expand a Hadoop cluster. In particular, we learned where to find the default values for Hadoop configuration properties and how to set them programmatically on a per-job level. We learned how to choose hardware for a cluster and the value in understanding your likely workload before committing to purchases, and how Hadoop can use awareness of the physical location of hosts to optimize its block placement strategy through the use of rack awareness.
We then saw how the default Hadoop security model works, its weaknesses and how to mitigate them, how to mitigate the risks of NameNode failure we introduced in Chapter 6, When Things Break, and how to swap to a new NameNode host if disaster strikes. We learned more about block replica placement, how the cluster can become unbalanced, and what to do if it does.
We also saw the Hadoop model for MapReduce job scheduling and learned how job priorities can modify the behavior, how the Capacity...