1. Preparations

Prepare SSH key

First of all you need to create an SSH key pair for securely accessing the cluster.

ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "EMR Access Key" -f deployer-key
puttygen deployer-key -o deployer-key.ppk

Create AWS Route53 Zone

The Terraform scripts will regsiter all master nodes in the public DNS via Route53. Therefore you need to provide a AWS Route53 zone in advance which can be used for creating appropriate DNS records.

Create AWS Configuration

You need to copy the aws-config.tf.template file to aws-config.tf and modify it so that it contains your AWS credentials and the desired AWS region and availability zone. You can also specify the file name of the SSH key.

Modify General Configuration

Now that you have everything together, you also might want to adjust some settings in main.tf. Per default four EMR clusters will be created, each having two nodes (one master and one worker). At least you need to specify the Route53 zone to use.

The following properties can be set in the emr section in main.tf:

• proxy_domain Specify set the Route53 zone name for registering the web-interfaces to the public DNS. This setting has to match the corresponding domain name and will be used for setting up the reverse proxy
• proxy_user Configure the user name used for basic http authentication. This provides a very basic level of security for the clusters.
• proxy_password Configure the corresponding password for http basic auth to the web interfaces.
• names Configures the names of the clusters. For each name a separate EMR cluster will be created.
• release Specfify the desired EMR release
• application Specify the EMR components to be installed.
• master_type Set the desired EC2 instance type for the master
• worker_type Set the desired EC2 instance type for the worker

In addition the following properties can be set in the route53 section in main.tf:

• zone_name Again this needs to contain the Route53 zone name where all DNS entries are created. The scripts will NOT create this zone, it has be be provided by you in advance.

You also might want to change the network configuration, but if you change the subnets, you also should adjust foxy-proxy.xml with the corresponding settings.

2. Starting and stopping the Clusters

Start Cluster

terraform init
terraform apply

Destroy Cluster

terraform destroy

Note that you probably need to destroy the security groups manually in the web-interface, since cycling dependencies are not handled correctly in Terraform

Manual Cleanup

Sometimes it might be neccessary to clean up some resources manually, where not AWS web frontend is available:

aws iam remove-role-from-instance-profile --role-name training_ec2_role --instance-profile-name training_ec2_profile
aws iam delete-instance-profile --instance-profile-name training_ec2_profile

3. Connect to Cluster

You can then connect to the cluster via SSH

ssh -i deployer-key hadoop@<cluster_name>.<route_53_zone_name>

where cluster_name is one of the names configured in main.tf and route_53_zone_name is the Route53 zone where all computers will be registered.

Web Interface

As part of the deployment a reverse proxy will be setup such that you can access most services via your web-browser. You can find an entry page at

http://<cluster_name>.<route_53_zone_name>

where cluster_name is one of the names configured in main.tf and route_53_zone_name is the Route53 zone where all computers will be registered.

Web Tunnel Connection

You can create a proxy tunnel using SSH dynamic port forwarding, which again can be easily used with FoxyProxy plugin.

ssh -i deployer-key -ND 8157 hadoop@<cluster_name>.<route_53_zone_name>

The tunneled URLs for the relevant services in EMR are as follows:

YARN - http://master:8088
HDFS - http://master:50070
Hue - http://master:8888
Zeppelin - http://master:8890
Spark History - http://master:18080
Jupyter Notebook - http://master:8899