Creating an HDInsight Compute Cluster

Large datasets can be stored and processed using Hadoop, an open-source distributed computing platform, across a cluster of commodity hardware. It is made up of two primary parts:

• MapReduce: Processes and analyzes data in parallel, and the

• Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS): Stores data across several devices.

Hadoop is highly suited for processing enormous volumes of data and executing data-intensive applications across large compute clusters thanks to its distributed architecture and fault-tolerant design. It is a popular option for big data processing and analytics in many industries due to its scalability, affordability, and capacity for handling both organized and unstructured data.

Hadoop in Microsoft Azure

In Microsoft Azure, Hadoop is available as a managed service called Azure HDInsight. HDInsight provides a fully managed Hadoop cluster that simplifies the deployment, configuration, and scaling of Hadoop-based big data solutions. It allows users to leverage the power of Hadoop without worrying about the underlying infrastructure, maintenance, or software updates.

Some key features of Azure HDInsight specific to Azure integration include:

1. Easy deployment: With just a few clicks or a single command, users can provision a Hadoop cluster in Azure, reducing the time and effort required to set up and manage the infrastructure.

2. Integration with Azure services: HDInsight seamlessly integrates with other Azure services like Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure Blob Storage, Azure Data Factory, and Azure SQL Database, enabling users to build end-to-end big data solutions using familiar Azure components.

3. Security and compliance: HDInsight supports integration with Azure Active Directory for authentication and role-based access control, ensuring secure data processing and compliance with organizational policies.

4. Autoscaling: HDInsight offers autoscaling capabilities, allowing the cluster to automatically adjust its size based on workload demands, optimizing resource utilization and cost efficiency.

5. Monitoring and management: Azure Monitor provides extensive monitoring and diagnostics for HDInsight clusters, enabling users to gain insights into cluster health, performance, and resource usage.

HDInsight implementation in Azure

We discovered that HDInsight is Azure’s implementation of the Hadoop big data processing system. Let’s create an HDInsight resource in our Azure account to see how Hadoop systems are implemented in Azure. We’ll use Azure CLI to create an HDInsight cluster.

Note: By default, Azure subscriptions are not active with HDInsight capabilities. In case of issues regarding the creation of an HDInsight cluster, please enable the Microsoft.HDInsight resource for the subscription. Steps for doing this are explained here.

1. Create a resource group: Continuing with the practice of creating separate resource groups for every project, let’s start by creating a new resource group for our HDInsight cluster. In this command, $ResourceGroupName is a variable holding the actual name, such as az-edu-hdinsight-rg.