Creating a YARN Application using Scala

Arun ManivannanMay 25th, 2018Last Updated: May 30th, 2018

0 70 4 minutes read

I have been recently playing with Apache Amaterasu, which is an amazing project that helps to deploy data pipelines. It’s still incubating and has a super-friendly team of engineers working on it. Some exciting features are lined up. Don’t take my word for it. Please check it out yourself.

Amaterasu launches containers (on YARN/Mesos) all by itself for each of the stages in your data pipeline. All you need to provide is your repository and a YAML based configuration.

I was just curious about launching containers on YARN and how the API works and thought I should give it a try myself. It’s really intuitive if we understand a small set of constructs.

This post is an attempt on a minimal example of a YARN application on Scala.

Note : The complete code is available at github

There are three core classes in this App :
1. SampleYarnClient
2. ApplicationMaster
3. DummyApplication (the business logic)

1. SampleYarnClient

This is the entry-point of the program. Does the following :

Instantiates YarnClient.
Negotiates resources for the ApplicationMaster container with the help of the YarnClient. The way it does it is to initiate an ApplicationSubmissionContext which is just a wrapper around the Resource, Priority and ContainerLaunchContext (among others). Let’s quickly look at the code and we’ll go over in detail on these three components of the SubmissionContext.

val yarnClient = YarnClient.createYarnClient()  
...
val application = yarnClient.createApplication()  
...
val context = application.getApplicationSubmissionContext  
context.setAMContainerSpec(amContainer)  
context.setApplicationName("Scala Yarn App")  
context.setResource(resource)  
context.setPriority(priority)

yarnClient.submitApplication(context)

a. Resource

Resources is a simple wrapper around CPU and Memory

val resource = Resource.newInstance(1024, 2) //1 GB memory and 2 cores

b. Priority

Priority is just an Integer – the higher the number, the higher the priority

val priority = Records.newRecord(classOf[Priority])  
priority.setPriority(1)

c. ContainerLaunchContext

The ContainerLaunchRequest has three primary parameters in this simple example :

Commands (List[String]): The bootstrap command (ideally java <MainClass>)
LocalResources (Map[String,LocalResource]) : The jars and the other artifacts (properties, libraries etc) that’s essential for running your command
Environment (Map[String,String]): The environment variables essential for the program

(the other important one is the Security Tokens which is not used here because my local cluster isn’t kerberized)

def createContainerContext(commands: List[String], resources: Map[String, LocalResource], environment: Map[String, String]): ContainerLaunchContext = {
    val launchContext = Records.newRecord(classOf[ContainerLaunchContext])
    launchContext.setCommands(commands.asJava)
    launchContext.setLocalResources(resources.asJava)
    launchContext.setEnvironment(environment.asJava)
    launchContext
  }

Commands

Like I said, the commands are just a sequence of instructions you would like to execute to run the ApplicationMaster from the shell.

val commands = List(  
      "$JAVA_HOME/bin/java " +
        " -Xmx256m " +
        s" com.arunma.ApplicationMaster " +
        " 1> " + ApplicationConstants.LOG_DIR_EXPANSION_VAR + "/stdout" +
        " 2> " + ApplicationConstants.LOG_DIR_EXPANSION_VAR + "/stderr"
    )

LocalResources

As for this program, you don’t need any properties or configuration files. All you need is just the jar binary alone.

Note : The way that you make any binary or resource available for YARN is to place the binaries in a HDFS location. This particular step involving the setting up of local resources just means that we are telling YARN to download the binaries from the HDFS location and place in in the local path of the container when launched.

val localResources = Map(  
      "SampleYarnApp-assembly-0.1.jar" -> setUpLocalResourceFromPath(yarnPath) 
    )

Environment

These are custom environment variables or just the classpath that needs to be set for your bundle to run.

2. ApplicationMaster

Now that we have discussed about the SampleYarnClient, let’s discuss the second. This class, as the name indicates, is your ApplicationMaster (Duh!). It’s responsible for launching the containers that is expected to run your “business logic”. The steps are :

The AppMaster uses the ResourceManager client (the AMRMClient) to raise a request for a container – ContainerRequest. This example uses the async version of the client – AMRMClientAsync that implements a series of callbacks – onContainersAllocated, onContainersCompleted, onError etc .
When the RM allocates a container for the application, the onContainersAllocated callback gets invoked.
Within the onContainersAllocated (now that we have the handle to the container), the AppMaster then uses the NMClientAsync to launch the “business” container (DummyApplication). This is achieved by constructing another ContainerLaunchContext (the one that wraps commands, local resources and environment variables).

override def onContainersAllocated(containers: util.List[Container]): Unit = {

    val commands = List(
      "$JAVA_HOME/bin/java " +
        " -Xmx256m " +
        s" com.arunma.DummyApplication " +
        " 1> " + ApplicationConstants.LOG_DIR_EXPANSION_VAR + "/stdout" +
        " 2> " + ApplicationConstants.LOG_DIR_EXPANSION_VAR + "/stderr"
    )

    val localResources = Map(
      "SampleYarnApp-assembly-0.1.jar" -> setUpLocalResourceFromPath(FileSystem.get(conf).makeQualified(new Path(sys.env("ARUN_JAR_PATH"))))
    )

    val containerLaunchContext = createContainerContext(commands, localResources, buildEnvironment(Map()))

    containers.asScala.foreach { container =>
      nmClient.startContainerAsync(container, containerLaunchContext)
    }
}

3. DummyApplication

This is the “business logic”. Not Scala in the purest sense but it helps us see the logs. Note that because this is an infinite loop, we’ll have to forcefully kill the application.

object DummyApplication extends App {  
     while(true) {
       println("Niceeeeeeeeee !!! This is the core application that is running within the container that got negotiated by from Application Master !!!")
       Thread.sleep(1000)
     }
   }

Usage:

$ hadoop jar /Users/arun/IdeaProjects/SampleYarnApp/target/scala-2.11/SampleYarnApp-assembly-0.1.jar com.arunma.SampleYarnClient /Users/arun/IdeaProjects/SampleYarnApp/target/scala-2.11/SampleYarnApp-assembly-0.1.jar

Alternatively, you could just do an

sbt assembly

and run the SampleYarnClient from your IDE with the absolute path of the assembly jar as the first argument.

Published on Java Code Geeks with permission by Arun Manivannan, partner at our JCG program. See the original article here: Creating a YARN Application using Scala

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