Hadoop: Capacity Scheduler

Purpose

This document describes the CapacityScheduler, a pluggable scheduler for Hadoop which allows for multiple-tenants to securely share a large cluster such that their applications are allocated resources in a timely manner under constraints of allocated capacities.

Overview

The CapacityScheduler is designed to run Hadoop applications as a shared, multi-tenant cluster in an operator-friendly manner while maximizing the throughput and the utilization of the cluster.

Traditionally each organization has it own private set of compute resources that have sufficient capacity to meet the organization’s SLA under peak or near peak conditions. This generally leads to poor average utilization and overhead of managing multiple independent clusters, one per each organization. Sharing clusters between organizations is a cost-effective manner of running large Hadoop installations since this allows them to reap benefits of economies of scale without creating private clusters. However, organizations are concerned about sharing a cluster because they are worried about others using the resources that are critical for their SLAs.

The CapacityScheduler is designed to allow sharing a large cluster while giving each organization capacity guarantees. The central idea is that the available resources in the Hadoop cluster are shared among multiple organizations who collectively fund the cluster based on their computing needs. There is an added benefit that an organization can access any excess capacity not being used by others. This provides elasticity for the organizations in a cost-effective manner.

Sharing clusters across organizations necessitates strong support for multi-tenancy since each organization must be guaranteed capacity and safe-guards to ensure the shared cluster is impervious to single rouge application or user or sets thereof. The CapacityScheduler provides a stringent set of limits to ensure that a single application or user or queue cannot consume disproportionate amount of resources in the cluster. Also, the CapacityScheduler provides limits on initialized/pending applications from a single user and queue to ensure fairness and stability of the cluster.

The primary abstraction provided by the CapacityScheduler is the concept of queues. These queues are typically setup by administrators to reflect the economics of the shared cluster.

To provide further control and predictability on sharing of resources, the CapacityScheduler supports hierarchical queues to ensure resources are shared among the sub-queues of an organization before other queues are allowed to use free resources, there-by providing affinity for sharing free resources among applications of a given organization.

Features

The CapacityScheduler supports the following features:

• Hierarchical Queues - Hierarchy of queues is supported to ensure resources are shared among the sub-queues of an organization before other queues are allowed to use free resources, there-by providing more control and predictability.

• Capacity Guarantees - Queues are allocated a fraction of the capacity of the grid in the sense that a certain capacity of resources will be at their disposal. All applications submitted to a queue will have access to the capacity allocated to the queue. Adminstrators can configure soft limits and optional hard limits on the capacity allocated to each queue.

• Security - Each queue has strict ACLs which controls which users can submit applications to individual queues. Also, there are safe-guards to ensure that users cannot view and/or modify applications from other users. Also, per-queue and system administrator roles are supported.

• Elasticity - Free resources can be allocated to any queue beyond it’s capacity. When there is demand for these resources from queues running below capacity at a future point in time, as tasks scheduled on these resources complete, they will be assigned to applications on queues running below the capacity (pre-emption is not supported). This ensures that resources are available in a predictable and elastic manner to queues, thus preventing artifical silos of resources in the cluster which helps utilization.

• Multi-tenancy - Comprehensive set of limits are provided to prevent a single application, user and queue from monopolizing resources of the queue or the cluster as a whole to ensure that the cluster isn’t overwhelmed.

• Operability

  • Runtime Configuration - The queue definitions and properties such as capacity, ACLs can be changed, at runtime, by administrators in a secure manner to minimize disruption to users. Also, a console is provided for users and administrators to view current allocation of resources to various queues in the system. Administrators can add additional queues at runtime, but queues cannot be deleted at runtime.
  • Drain applications - Administrators can stop queues at runtime to ensure that while existing applications run to completion, no new applications can be submitted. If a queue is in STOPPED state, new applications cannot be submitted to itself or any of its child queueus. Existing applications continue to completion, thus the queue can be drained gracefully. Administrators can also start the stopped queues.

• Resource-based Scheduling - Support for resource-intensive applications, where-in a application can optionally specify higher resource-requirements than the default, there-by accomodating applications with differing resource requirements. Currently, memory is the the resource requirement supported.

• Queue Mapping based on User or Group - This feature allows users to map a job to a specific queue based on the user or group.

Configuration

<property>
  <name>yarn.scheduler.capacity.root.queues</name>
  <value>a,b,c</value>
  <description>The queues at the this level (root is the root queue).
  </description>
</property>

<property>
  <name>yarn.scheduler.capacity.root.a.queues</name>
  <value>a1,a2</value>
  <description>The queues at the this level (root is the root queue).
  </description>
</property>

<property>
  <name>yarn.scheduler.capacity.root.b.queues</name>
  <value>b1,b2,b3</value>
  <description>The queues at the this level (root is the root queue).
  </description>
</property>

 <property>
   <name>yarn.scheduler.capacity.queue-mappings</name>
   <value>u:user1:queue1,g:group1:queue2,u:%user:%user,u:user2:%primary_group</value>
   <description>
     Here, <user1> is mapped to <queue1>, <group1> is mapped to <queue2>, 
     maps users to queues with the same name as user, <user2> is mapped 
     to queue name same as <primary group> respectively. The mappings will be 
     evaluated from left to right, and the first valid mapping will be used.
   </description>
 </property>

Changing Queue Configuration

Changing queue properties and adding new queues is very simple. You need to edit conf/capacity-scheduler.xml and run yarn rmadmin -refreshQueues.

$ vi $HADOOP_CONF_DIR/capacity-scheduler.xml
$ $HADOOP_YARN_HOME/bin/yarn rmadmin -refreshQueues

Note: Queues cannot be deleted, only addition of new queues is supported - the updated queue configuration should be a valid one i.e. queue-capacity at each level should be equal to 100%.