REDDIT EXPLORE PROJECT

In this project we have used comments from reddit to play around with multiple functionalities of Apache Spark, HDFS and Docker. The main objective of the project was to get our hands dirty with setting up containerized clusters of Apache Spark, HDFS using Docker functionalities. This was done as a part of a grading requirement for a Data Engineering course.

The collaborators of this project are:

• Atefeh Aramian
• Gabriel Arteaga
• Dinindu Seneviratne
• Kim Mathews
• Tayyab Hasan
• Ludvig Westerholm

The main phases of the project were as follows:

1. Setup a multi-container Spark-HDFS cluster using docker-compose.
2. Run multiple analysis on the dataset provided - Reddit Comments.
3. Choose few analysis pipelines and run experiments to find out the performance with variable worker nodes.

1. Setting up the multi-container Spark-HDFS cluster

The base architecture we setup looks as follows:

STEP 1: INSTALLATION OF PRE-REQUISITES FOR THE VM

• Install pip, Jupyter and PySpark

  sudo apt install python3-pip
  pip3 install Jupyter
  pip install pyspark
  

• Spark Installation

  Download the tarball for Spark 3.2.3

  wget https://dlcdn.apache.org/spark/spark-3.2.3/spark-3.2.3-bin-hadoop3.2.tgz
  

  Extract the tarball

  tar -xvf spark-3.2.3-bin-hadoop3.2.tgz
  

  Remove the zipped file

  rm spark-3.2.3-bin-hadoop3.2.tgz
  

  Move the directory /opt/ and rename it as spark

  sudo mv spark-3.2.3-bin-hadoop3.2/ /opt/spark
  

  Save SPARK_HOME in Environment Variables (.bashrc)

  nano .bashrc
  

  Add the following to the .bashrc file

  export SPARK_HOME=/opt/spark
  export PATH=$PATH:$SPARK_HOME/bin:$SPARK_HOME/sbin
  

• Install Docker using official documentation: Docker Installation

STEP 2: SETUP THE PROJECT REPOSITORY

• Clone the reddit-explore-uu repository

  git clone https://github.com/dininduviduneth/reddit-explore-uu.git
  

STEP 3: BUILD DOCKER IMAGES AND START CLUSTER

• Build and start the base cluster

  docker-compose up -d
  

• Verify successful completion

  Check if the required images are created

  docker images
  

  The images bde2020/hadoop-namenode , bde2020/hadoop-datanode, docker-config_spark-master and docker-config_spark-worker must have been created.

  Check if the containers are up and running

  docker ps
  

  There should be three containers running - one each for spark-master, spark-worker, hadoop namenode and hadoop datanode.

STEP 4: UPLOADING DATA TO HDFS

• Download the required Reddit dataset to the VM

  wget https://files.pushshift.io/reddit/comments/[REDDIT_DATASET_FILENAME].zst
  

• Extract the dataset

  unzstd --ultra --memory=2048MB -d [REDDIT_DATASET_FILENAME].zst
  

• Delete the zipped file

  rm [REDDIT_DATASET_FILENAME].zst
  

• Push the file to HDFS using -put command

  hdfs dfs -put [REDDIT_DATASET_FILENAME] /
  

• Once uploaded the dataset should be visible at the Web UI of HDFS - http://[PUBLIC IP OF VM]:9870/

STEP 5: STARTING JUPYTER AND RUNNING ANALYSIS CODE

• Start a Jupyter server

python3 -m notebook --ip=* --no-browser

• Navigate to data-analysis within the reddit-explore-uu directory and run the analysis notebooks.

STEP 6: SCALING

We have used Docker's docker-compose scale functionality to autoscale our spark worker nodes. The scaled setup for seven worker nodes looks as follows:

• To scale the workers by X

  docker-compose scale spark-worker=X
  

STEP 7: SHUTTING DOWN

• To stop a scaled cluster, first scale down to 1 worker node

  docker-compose scale spark-worker=1
  

• To stop the containers

  docker-compose stop