Introduction

to Apache YARN

Copyright © 2017 by DABSTER,Inc www.dabsterinc.com

Apache Hadoop YARN –
Background and an Overview
MapReduce – The Paradigm

Essentially, the MapReduce model consists of a first, embarrassingly parallel, map

phase where input data is split into discreet chunks to be processed. It is followed by
the second and final reduce phase where the output of the map phase is aggregated to
produce the desired result. The simple, and fairly restricted, nature of the programming
model lends itself to very efficient and extremely large-scale implementations across
thousands of cheap, commodity nodes.

Apache Hadoop MapReduce is the most popular open-source implementation of the

MapReduce model.

In particular, when MapReduce is paired with a distributed file-system such as Apache

Hadoop HDFS, which can provide very high aggregate I/O bandwidth across a large
cluster, the economics of the system are extremely compelling – a key factor in the
popularity of Hadoop.

One of the keys to this is the lack of data motion i.e. move compute to data and do not
move data to the compute node via the network. Specifically, the MapReduce tasks can
be scheduled on the same physical nodes on which data is resident in HDFS, which
exposes the underlying storage layout across the cluster. This significantly reduces the
network I/O patterns and keeps most of the I/O on the local disk or within the same rack
– a core advantage.

Apache Hadoop MapReduce, circa 2011 – A Recap

Apache Hadoop MapReduce is an open-source, Apache Software Foundation project,

which is an implementation of the MapReduce programming paradigm described above.
Now, as someone who has spent over six years working full-time on Apache Hadoop, I
normally like to point out that the Apache Hadoop MapReduce project itself can be
broken down into the following major facets:

• The end-user MapReduce API for programming the desired MapReduce

application.

Copyright © 2017 by DABSTER,Inc www.dabsterinc.com

 • The MapReduce framework, which is the runtime implementation of various
phases such as the map phase, the sort/shuffle/merge aggregation and the
reduce phase.
• The MapReduce system, which is the backend infrastructure required to run the
user’s MapReduce application, manage cluster resources, schedule thousands
of concurrent jobs etc.

This separation of concerns has significant benefits, particularly for the end-users – they
can completely focus on the application via the API and allow the combination of the
MapReduce Framework and the MapReduce System to deal with the ugly details such
as resource management, fault-tolerance, scheduling etc.

The current Apache Hadoop MapReduce System is composed of the JobTracker, which
is the master, and the per-node slaves called TaskTrackers.

The JobTracker is responsible for resource management (managing the worker nodes
i.e. TaskTrackers),tracking resource consumption/availability and also job life-cycle
management (scheduling individual tasks of the job, tracking progress, providing fault-
tolerance for tasks etc).

Copyright © 2017 by DABSTER,Inc www.dabsterinc.com

The TaskTracker has simple responsibilities – launch/teardown tasks on orders from the
JobTracker and provide task-status information to the JobTracker periodically.

For a while, we have understood that the Apache Hadoop MapReduce framework
needed an overhaul. In particular, with regards to the JobTracker, we needed to
address several aspects regarding scalability, cluster utilization, ability for customers to
control upgrades to the stack i.e. customer agility and equally importantly, supporting
workloads other than MapReduce itself.

We’ve done running repairs over time, including recent support for JobTracker
availability and resiliency to HDFS issues (both of which are available in Hortonworks
Data Platform v1 i.e. HDP1) but lately they’ve come at an ever-increasing maintenance
cost and yet, did not address core issues such as support for non-MapReduce and
customer agility.

Why support non-MapReduce workloads?

MapReduce is great for many applications, but not everything; other programming
models better serve requirements such as graph processing (Google Pregel / Apache
Giraph) and iterative modeling (MPI). When all the data in the enterprise is already
available in Hadoop HDFS having multiple paths for processing is critical.

Furthermore, since MapReduce is essentially batch-oriented, support for real-time and

near real-time processing such as stream processing and CEPFresil are emerging
requirements from our customer base.

Providing these within Hadoop enables organizations to see an increased return on the
Hadoop investments by lowering operational costs for administrators, reducing the need
to move data between Hadoop HDFS and other storage systems etc.

What are the common scenarios for low cluster utilization?

In the current system, JobTracker views the cluster as composed of nodes (managed
by individual TaskTrackers) with distinct map slots and reduce slots, which are
not fungible. Utilization issues occur because maps slots might be ‘full’ while reduce
slots are empty (and vice-versa). Fixing this was necessary to ensure the entire system
could be used to its maximum capacity for high utilization.

Copyright © 2017 by DABSTER,Inc www.dabsterinc.com

What is the notion of customer agility?

In real-world deployments, Hadoop is very commonly deployed as a shared, multi-

tenant system. As a result, changes to the Hadoop software stack affect a large cross-
section if not the entire enterprise. Against that backdrop, customers are very keen on
controlling upgrades to the software stack as it has a direct impact on their applications.
Thus, allowing multiple, if limited, versions of the MapReduce framework is critical for
Hadoop.

Reference

http://hortonworks.com/blog/introducing-apache-hadoop-yarn/

Philosophy behind YARN

Resource Management

YARN is part of the next generation Hadoop cluster compute environment. It creates a
generic and flexible resource management framework to administer the compute
resources in a Hadoop cluster. The YARN application framework allows multiple
applications to negotiate resources for themselves and perform their application specific
computations on a shared cluster. Thus, resource allocation lies at the heart of YARN.

YARN ultimately opens up Hadoop to additional compute frameworks, like Tez, so that
an application can optimize compute for their specific requirements.

The YARN Resource Manager service is the central controlling authority for resource
management and makes allocation decisions. It exposes a Scheduler API that is
specifically designed to negotiate resources and not schedule tasks. Applications can
request resources at different layers of the cluster topology such as nodes, racks etc.
The scheduler determines how much and where to allocate based on resource
availability and the configured sharing policy.

Currently, there are two sharing policies – fair scheduling and capacity scheduling.
Thus, the API reflects the Resource Manager’s role as the resource allocator. This API
design is also crucial for Resource Manager scalability because it limits the complexity
of the operations to the size of the cluster and not the size of the tasks running on the
cluster.The actual task scheduling decisions are delegated to the application manager
that runs the application logic. It decides when, where and how many tasks to run within

Copyright © 2017 by DABSTER,Inc www.dabsterinc.com

the resources allocated to it. It has the flexibility to choose its locality, co-scheduling, co-
location and other scheduling strategies.

Fundamentally, YARN resource scheduling is a 2-step framework with resource

allocation done by YARN and task scheduling done by the application. This allows
YARN to be a generic compute platform while still allowing flexibility of scheduling
strategies. An analogy would be general purpose operating systems that allocate
computer resources among concurrent processes.

We envision YARN to be the cluster operating system. It may be the case that this 2-
step approach is slower than a custom scheduling logic but we believe that such
problems can be alleviated by careful design and engineering. Having the custom
scheduling logic reside inside the application allows the application to be run on any
YARN cluster. This is important for creating a vibrant YARN application ecosystem (tez
is a good example of this) that can be easily deployed on any YARN cluster. Developing
YARN scheduling libraries will alleviate the developer effort needed to create application
specific schedulers and YARN-103 is a step in that direction.

Copyright © 2017 by DABSTER,Inc www.dabsterinc.com

Enter Apache Hadoop YARN
The fundamental idea of YARN is to split up the two major responsibilities of the
JobTracker i.e. resource management and job scheduling/monitoring, into separate
daemons: a global ResourceManager and per-application ApplicationMaster (AM).

The ResourceManager and per-node slave, the NodeManager (NM), form the new, and
generic, system for managing applications in a distributed manner.

The ResourceManager is the ultimate authority that arbitrates resources among all the
applications in the system. The per-application ApplicationMaster is, in effect,
a framework specific entity and is tasked with negotiating resources from the
ResourceManager and working with the NodeManager(s) to execute and monitor the
component tasks.

The ResourceManager has a pluggable Scheduler, which is responsible for allocating

resources to the various running applications subject to familiar constraints of
capacities, queues etc. The Scheduler is a pure scheduler in the sense that it performs
no monitoring or tracking of status for the application, offering no guarantees on
restarting failed tasks either due to application failure or hardware failures. The
Scheduler performs its scheduling function based on the resource requirements of the
applications; it does so based on the abstract notion of aResource Container which
incorporates resource elements such as memory, cpu, disk, network etc.

The NodeManager is the per-machine slave, which is responsible for launching the
applications’ containers, monitoring their resource usage (cpu, memory, disk, network)
and reporting the same to the ResourceManager.

The per-application ApplicationMaster has the responsibility of negotiating appropriate

resource containers from the Scheduler, tracking their status and monitoring for
progress. From the system perspective, the ApplicationMaster itself runs as a
normal container.

Copyright © 2017 by DABSTER,Inc www.dabsterinc.com

Here is an architectural view of YARN:

One of the crucial implementation details for MapReduce within the new
YARN system that I’d like to point out is that we have reused the existing
MapReduce framework without any major surgery. This was very important to
ensure compatibility for existing MapReduce applications and users. More on this
later.

Reference

http://hortonworks.com/blog/apache-hadoop-yarn-background-and-an-overview/

Copyright © 2017 by DABSTER,Inc www.dabsterinc.com

Apache Hadoop YARN – Concepts
and Applications

As previously described, YARN is essentially a system for managing distributed

applications. It consists of a central ResourceManager, which arbitrates all available
cluster resources, and a per-node NodeManager, which takes direction from the
ResourceManager and is responsible for managing resources available on a single
node.

Copyright © 2017 by DABSTER,Inc www.dabsterinc.com

Resource Manager

In YARN, the ResourceManager is, primarily, a pure scheduler. In essence, it’s strictly
limited to arbitrating available resources in the system among the competing
applications – a market maker if you will. It optimizes for cluster utilization (keep all
resources in use all the time) against various constraints such as capacity guarantees,
fairness, and SLAs. To allow for different policy constraints the ResourceManager has
a pluggable scheduler that allows for different algorithms such as capacity and fair
scheduling to be used as necessary.

ApplicationMaster

Many will draw parallels between YARN and the existing Hadoop MapReduce system
(MR1 in Apache Hadoop 1.x). However, the key difference is the new concept of
an ApplicationMaster.

The ApplicationMaster is, in effect, an instance of a framework-specific library and is

responsible for negotiating resources from the ResourceManager and working with the
NodeManager(s) to execute and monitor the containers and their resource
consumption. It has the responsibility of negotiating appropriate resource containers
from the ResourceManager, tracking their status and monitoring progress.

The ApplicationMaster allows YARN to exhibit the following key characteristics:

• Scale: The Application Master provides much of the functionality of the traditional
ResourceManager so that the entire system can scale more dramatically. In
tests, we’ve already successfully simulated 10,000 node clusters composed of
modern hardware without significant issue. This is one of the key reasons that we
have chosen to design the ResourceManager as a pure scheduler i.e. it doesn’t
attempt to provide fault-tolerance for resources. We shifted that to become a
primary responsibility of the ApplicationMaster instance. Furthermore, since there
is an instance of an ApplicationMaster per application, the ApplicationMaster
itself isn’t a common bottleneck in the cluster.

• Open: Moving all application framework specific code into the ApplicationMaster
generalizes the system so that we can now support multiple frameworks such as
MapReduce, MPI and Graph Processing.

Copyright © 2017 by DABSTER,Inc www.dabsterinc.com

It’s a good point to interject some of the key YARN design decisions:

• Move all complexity (to the extent possible) to the ApplicationMaster while
providing sufficient functionality to allow application-framework authors sufficient
flexibility and power.

• Since it is essentially user-code, do not trust the ApplicationMaster(s) i.e. any

ApplicationMaster is not a privileged service.

• The YARN system (ResourceManager and NodeManager) has to protect itself

from faulty or malicious ApplicationMaster(s) and resources granted to them at all
costs.

It’s useful to remember that, in reality, every application has its own instance of an
ApplicationMaster. However, it’s completely feasible to implement an ApplicationMaster
to manage a set of applications (e.g. ApplicationMaster for Pig or Hive to manage a set
of MapReduce jobs). Furthermore, this concept has been stretched to manage long-
running services which manage their own applications (e.g. launch HBase in YARN via
an hypothetical HBaseAppMaster).

Resource Model

YARN supports a very general resource model for applications. An application (via the
ApplicationMaster) can request resources with highly specific requirements such as:

• Resource-name (hostname, rackname – we are in the process of generalizing

this further to support more complex network topologies with YARN-18).

• Memory (in MB)

• CPU (cores, for now)

• In future, expect us to add more resource-types such as disk/network I/O, GPUs

etc.

Copyright © 2017 by DABSTER,Inc www.dabsterinc.com

ResourceRequest and Container

YARN is designed to allow individual applications (via the ApplicationMaster) to utilize

cluster resources in a shared, secure and multi-tenant manner. Also, it remains aware
of cluster topology in order to efficiently schedule and optimize data access i.e. reduce
data motion for applications to the extent possible.

In order to meet those goals, the central Scheduler (in the ResourceManager) has
extensive information about an application’s resource needs, which allows it to make
better scheduling decisions across all applications in the cluster. This leads us to
the ResourceRequest and the resulting Container.

Essentially an application can ask for specific resource requests via the
ApplicationMaster to satisfy its resource needs. The Scheduler responds to a resource
request by granting a container, which satisfies the requirements laid out by the
ApplicationMaster in the initial ResourceRequest.

Let’s look at the ResourceRequest – it has the following form:

<resource-name, priority, resource-requirement, number-of-containers>

Let’s walk through each component of the ResourceRequest to understand this better.

• resource-name is either hostname, rackname or * to indicate no preference. In

future, we expect to support even more complex topologies for virtual machines
on a host, more complex networks etc.

• priority is intra-application priority for this request (to stress, this isn’t across
multiple applications).

• resource-requirement is required capabilities such as memory, cpu etc. (at the

time of writing YARN only supports memory and cpu).

• number-of-containers is just a multiple of such containers.

Now, on to the Container.

Essentially, the Container is the resource allocation, which is the successful result of
the ResourceManager granting a specific ResourceRequest. A Container

Copyright © 2017 by DABSTER,Inc www.dabsterinc.com

grants rights to an application to use a specific amount of resources (memory, cpu etc.)
on a specific host.

The ApplicationMaster has to take the Container and present it to the NodeManager
managing the host, on which the container was allocated, to use the resources for
launching its tasks. Of course, the Container allocation is verified, in the secure mode,
to ensure that ApplicationMaster(s) cannot fake allocations in the cluster.

Container Specification during Container Launch

While a Container, as described above, is merely a right to use a specified amount of

resources on a specific machine (NodeManager) in the cluster, the ApplicationMaster
has to provide considerably more information to the NodeManager to
actually launch the container.

YARN allows applications to launch any process and, unlike existing Hadoop
MapReduce in hadoop-1.x (aka MR1), it isn’t limited to Java applications alone.

The YARN Container launch specification API is platform agnostic and contains:

• Command line to launch the process within the container.

• Environment variables.

• Local resources necessary on the machine prior to launch, such as jars, shared-
objects, auxiliary data files etc.

• Security-related tokens.

This allows the ApplicationMaster to work with the NodeManager to launch containers
ranging from simple shell scripts to C/Java/Python processes on Unix/Windows to full-
fledged virtual machines (e.g. KVMs).

Copyright © 2017 by DABSTER,Inc www.dabsterinc.com

YARN – Walkthrough
Armed with the knowledge of the above concepts, it will be useful to sketch how
applications conceptually work in YARN.

Application execution consists of the following steps:

• Application submission.

• Bootstrapping the ApplicationMaster instance for the application.

• Application execution managed by the ApplicationMaster instance.

Let’s walk through an application execution sequence (steps are illustrated in the
diagram):

1. A client program submits the application, including the necessary specifications

to launch the application-specific ApplicationMaster itself.

2. The ResourceManager assumes the responsibility to negotiate a specified

container in which to start the ApplicationMaster and then launches the
ApplicationMaster.

3. The ApplicationMaster, on boot-up, registers with the ResourceManager – the

registration allows the client program to query the ResourceManager for details,
which allow it to directly communicate with its own ApplicationMaster.

4. During normal operation the ApplicationMaster negotiates appropriate resource

containers via the resource-request protocol.

5. On successful container allocations, the ApplicationMaster launches the

container by providing the container launch specification to the NodeManager.
The launch specification, typically, includes the necessary information to allow
the container to communicate with the ApplicationMaster itself.

6. The application code executing within the container then provides necessary
information (progress, status etc.) to its ApplicationMaster via an application-
specific protocol.

Copyright © 2017 by DABSTER,Inc www.dabsterinc.com

 7. During the application execution, the client that submitted the program
communicates directly with the ApplicationMaster to get status, progress updates
etc. via an application-specific protocol.

8. Once the application is complete, and all necessary work has been finished, the
ApplicationMaster deregisters with the ResourceManager and shuts down,
allowing its own container to be repurposed.

In our next post in this series we dive more into guts of the YARN system, particularly the
ResourceManager – stay tuned!

Reference

http://hortonworks.com/blog/apache-hadoop-yarn-concepts-and-applications/

Copyright © 2017 by DABSTER,Inc www.dabsterinc.com

Apache Hadoop YARN –
ResourceManager

Apache Hadoop YARN – ResourceManager

As previously described, ResourceManager (RM) is the master that arbitrates all the
available cluster resources and thus helps manage the distributed applications running
on the YARN system. It works together with the per-node NodeManagers (NMs) and
the per-application ApplicationMasters (AMs).

1. NodeManagers take instructions from the ResourceManager and manage

resources available on a single node.
2. ApplicationMasters are responsible for negotiating resources with the
ResourceManager and for working with the NodeManagers to start the
containers.

Copyright © 2017 by DABSTER,Inc www.dabsterinc.com

ResourceManager Components
The ResourceManager has the following components (see the figure above):

1. Components interfacing RM to the clients:

o ClientService: The client interface to the Resource Manager. This
component handles all the RPC interfaces to the RM from the clients
including operations like application submission, application termination,
obtaining queue information, cluster statistics etc.
o AdminService: To make sure that admin requests don’t get starved due
to the normal users’ requests and to give the operators’ commands the
higher priority, all the admin operations like refreshing node-list, the
queues’ configuration etc. are served via this separate interface.
2. Components connecting RM to the nodes:
o ResourceTrackerService: This is the component that responds to RPCs
from all the nodes. It is responsible for registration of new nodes, rejecting
requests from any invalid/decommissioned nodes, obtain node-heartbeats
and forward them over to the YarnScheduler. It works closely with
NMLivelinessMonitor and NodesListManager described below.
o NMLivelinessMonitor: To keep track of live nodes and specifically note
down the dead nodes, this component keeps track of each node’s its last
heartbeat time. Any node that doesn’t heartbeat within a configured
interval of time, by default 10 minutes, is deemed dead and is expired by
the RM. All the containers currently running on an expired node are
marked as dead and no new containers are scheduling on such node.
o NodesListManager: A collection of valid and excluded nodes.
Responsible for reading the host configuration files specified
via yarn.resourcemanager.nodes.include-
path and yarn.resourcemanager.nodes.exclude-path and seeding
the initial list of nodes based on those files. Also keeps track of nodes that
are decommissioned as time progresses.
3. Components interacting with the per-application AMs:
o ApplicationMasterService: This is the component that responds to RPCs
from all the AMs. It is responsible for registration of new AMs,
termination/unregister-requests from any finishing AMs, obtaining
container-allocation & deallocation requests from all running AMs and forward

Copyright © 2017 by DABSTER,Inc www.dabsterinc.com

 them over to the YarnScheduler. This works closely with
AMLivelinessMonitor described below.
o AMLivelinessMonitor: To help manage the list of live AMs and dead/non-
responding AMs, this component keeps track of each AM and its last
heartbeat time. Any AM that doesn’t heartbeat within a configured interval
of time, by default 10 minutes, is deemed dead and is expired by the RM.
All the containers currently running/allocated to an AM that gets expired
are marked as dead. RM schedules the same AM to run on a new
container, allowing up to a maximum of 4 such attempts by default.
4. The core of the ResourceManager – the scheduler and related components:
o ApplicationsManager: Responsible for maintaining a collection of
submitted applications. Also keeps a cache of completed applications so
as to serve users’ requests via web UI or command line long after the
applications in question finished.
o ApplicationACLsManager: RM needs to gate the user facing APIs like
the client and admin requests to be accessible only to authorized users.
This component maintains the ACLs lists per application and enforces
them whenever an request like killing an application, viewing an
application status is received.
o ApplicationMasterLauncher: Maintains a thread-pool to launch AMs of
newly submitted applications as well as applications whose previous AM
attempts exited due to some reason. Also responsible for cleaning up the
AM when an application has finished normally or forcefully terminated.
o YarnScheduler: The Scheduler is responsible for allocating resources to
the various running applications subject to constraints of capacities,
queues etc. It performs its scheduling function based on the resource
requirements of the applications such as memory, CPU, disk, network etc.
Currently, only memory is supported and support for CPU is close to
completion.
o ContainerAllocationExpirer: This component is in charge of ensuring
that all allocated containers are used by AMs and subsequently launched
on the correspond NMs. AMs run as untrusted user code and can
potentially hold on to allocations without using them, and as such can
cause cluster under-utilization. To address this,
ContainerAllocationExpirer maintains the list of allocated containers that
are still not used on the corresponding NMs. For any container, if the
corresponding NM doesn’t report to the RM that the container has started

Copyright © 2017 by DABSTER,Inc www.dabsterinc.com

 running within a configured interval of time, by default 10 minutes, the
container is deemed as dead and is expired by the RM.
5. TokenSecretManagers (for security):ResourceManager has a collection of
SecretManagers which are charged with managing tokens, secret-keys that are
used to authenticate/authorize requests on various RPC interfaces. A future post
on YARN security will cover a more detailed descriptions of the tokens, secret-
keys and the secret-managers but a brief summary follows:
o ApplicationTokenSecretManager: To avoid arbitrary processes from
sending RM scheduling requests, RM uses the per-application tokens
called ApplicationTokens. This component saves each token locally in
memory till application finishes and uses it to authenticate any request
coming from a valid AM process.
o ContainerTokenSecretManager: SecretManager for ContainerTokens
that are special tokens issued by RM to an AM for a container on a
specific node. ContainerTokens are used by AMs to create a connection
to the corresponding NM where the container is allocated. This component
is RM-specific, keeps track of the underlying master and secret-keys and
rolls the keys every so often.
o RMDelegationTokenSecretManager: A ResourceManager specific
delegation-token secret-manager. It is responsible for generating
delegation tokens to clients which can be passed on to unauthenticated
processes that wish to be able to talk to RM.
6. DelegationTokenRenewer: In secure mode, RM is Kerberos authenticated and
so provides the service of renewing file-system tokens on behalf of the
applications. This component renews tokens of submitted applications as long as
the application runs and till the tokens can no longer be renewed.

Conclusion
In YARN, the ResourceManager is primarily limited to scheduling i.e. only arbitrating
available resources in the system among the competing applications and not
concerning itself with per-application state management. Because of this clear
separation of responsibilities coupled with the modularity described above, and with the
powerful scheduler API discussed in the previous post, RM is able to address the most
important design requirements – scalability, support for alternate programming
paradigms.

Copyright © 2017 by DABSTER,Inc www.dabsterinc.com

To allow for different policy constraints, the scheduler described above in the RM is
pluggable and allows for different algorithms. In a future post of this series, we will dig
deeper into various features of CapacityScheduler that schedules containers based on
capacity guarantees and queues.

Reference

http://hortonworks.com/blog/apache-hadoop-yarn-resourcemanager/

Apache Hadoop YARN –

NodeManager
Apache Hadoop YARN – NodeManager

The NodeManager (NM) is YARN’s per-node agent, and takes care of the individual
compute nodes in a Hadoop cluster. This includes keeping up-to date with the
ResourceManager (RM), overseeing containers’ life-cycle management; monitoring
resource usage (memory, CPU) of individual containers, tracking node-health, log’s
management and auxiliary services which may be exploited by different YARN
applications.

Copyright © 2017 by DABSTER,Inc www.dabsterinc.com

NodeManager Components

1. NodeStatusUpdater

On startup, this component registers with the RM and sends information about the
resources available on the nodes. Subsequent NM-RM communication is to provide
updates on container statuses – new containers running on the node, completed
containers, etc.

In addition the RM may signal the NodeStatusUpdater to potentially kill already running
containers.

1. ContainerManager

This is the core of the NodeManager. It is composed of the following sub-components,

each of which performs a subset of the functionality that is needed to manage
containers running on the node.

A. RPC server: ContainerManager accepts requests from Application Masters

(AMs) to start new containers, or to stop running ones. It works with
ContainerTokenSecretManager (described below) to authorize all requests. All the
operations performed on containers running on this node are written to an audit-log
which can be post-processed by security tools.

Copyright © 2017 by DABSTER,Inc www.dabsterinc.com

 B. ResourceLocalizationService: Responsible for securely
downloading and organizing various file resources needed by
containers. It tries its best to distribute the files across all the
available disks. It also enforces access control restrictions of the
downloaded files and puts appropriate usage limits on them.
C. ContainersLauncher: Maintains a pool of threads to prepare and
launch containers as quickly as possible. Also cleans up the
containers’ processes when such a request is sent by the RM or
the ApplicationMasters (AMs).
D. AuxServices: The NM provides a framework for extending its
functionality by configuring auxiliary services. This allows per-node
custom services that specific frameworks may require, and still
sandbox them from the rest of the NM. These services have to be
configured before NM starts. Auxiliary services are notified when an
application’s first container starts on the node, and when the
application is considered to be complete.
E. ContainersMonitor: After a container is launched, this component
starts observing its resource utilization while the container is
running. To enforce isolation and fair sharing of resources like
memory, each container is allocated some amount of such a
resource by the RM. The ContainersMonitor monitors each
container’s usage continuously and if a container exceeds its
allocation, it signals the container to be killed. This is done to
prevent any runaway container from adversely affecting other well-
behaved containers running on the same node.
F. LogHandler: A pluggable component with the option of either
keeping the containers’ logs on the local disks or zipping them
together and uploading them onto a file-system.
2. ContainerExecutor

Interacts with the underlying operating system to securely place files and directories
needed by containers and subsequently to launch and clean up processes
corresponding to containers in a secure manner.

1. NodeHealthCheckerService

Provides functionality of checking the health of the node by running a configured script
frequently. It also monitors the health of the disks specifically by creating temporary files

Copyright © 2017 by DABSTER,Inc www.dabsterinc.com

on the disks every so often. Any changes in the health of the system are notified to
NodeStatusUpdater (described above) which in turn passes on the information to the
RM.

1. Security
A. ApplicationACLsManagerNM needs to gate the user facing APIs like
container-logs’ display on the web-UI to be accessible only to authorized
users. This component maintains the ACLs lists per application and
enforces them whenever such a request is received.
B. ContainerTokenSecretManager: verifies various incoming
requests to ensure that all the incoming operations are indeed
properly authorized by the RM.
2. WebServer

Exposes the list of applications, containers running on the node at a given point of time,
node-health related information and the logs produced by the containers.

Spotlight on Key Functionality

1. Container Launch

To facilitate container launch, the NM expects to receive detailed information about a

container’s runtime as part of the container-specifications. This includes the container’s
command line, environment variables, a list of (file) resources required by the container
and any security tokens.

On receiving a container-launch request – the NM first verifies this request, if security is

enabled, to authorize the user, correct resources assignment, etc. The NM then
performs the following set of steps to launch the container.

A. A local copy of all the specified resources is created (Distributed Cache).

B. Isolated work directories are created for the container, and the local
resources are made available in these directories.
C. The launch environment and command line is used to start the
actual container.
2. Log Aggregation

Copyright © 2017 by DABSTER,Inc www.dabsterinc.com

Handling user-logs has been one of the big pain-points for Hadoop installations in the
past. Instead of truncating user-logs, and leaving them on individual nodes like the
TaskTracker, the NM addresses the logs’ management issue by providing the option to
move these logs securely onto a file-system (FS), for e.g. HDFS, after the application
completes.

Logs for all the containers belonging to a single Application and that ran on this NM are
aggregated and written out to a single (possibly compressed) log file at a configured
location in the FS. Users have access to these logs via YARN command line tools, the
web-UI or directly from the FS.

1. How MapReduce shuffle takes advantage of NM’s Auxiliary-services

The Shuffle functionality required to run a MapReduce (MR) application is implemented

as an Auxiliary Service. This service starts up a Netty Web Server, and knows how to
handle MR specific shuffle requests from Reduce tasks. The MR AM specifies the
service id for the shuffle service, along with security tokens that may be required. The
NM provides the AM with the port on which the shuffle service is running which is
passed onto the Reduce tasks.

Conclusion
In YARN, the NodeManager is primarily limited to managing abstract containers i.e. only
processes corresponding to a container and not concerning itself with per-application
state management like MapReduce tasks. It also does away with the notion of named
slots like map and reduce slots. Because of this clear separation of responsibilities
coupled with the modular architecture described above, NM can scale much more easily
and its code is much more maintainable.

Reference

http://hortonworks.com/blog/apache-hadoop-yarn-nodemanager/

Copyright © 2017 by DABSTER,Inc www.dabsterinc.com