This projects aim is to help you to get started with ambari. The 2 easiest way to have an ambari server:

• start an ec2 instance
• start a virtual instance on your dev box

Amazon is getting cheaper and cheaper, so its absolutely reasonable to spend the price of a cappuccino to try ambari on EC2. But sometimes you want it for 'free' or for whatever reason you don't want to use AWS.

You could go than for a virtual instance, and the use virtualbox or vmware, but Docker has some benefits:

• starting containers under a second
• taking snapshots, its freaking quick (its just settinga label)
• snapshots are cheap, thanks to the layering nature of the underlaying aufs
• memory management is easier, as docker is using the same memory as the hosts, while for several virtual instances, you have to declare memory limits one by one

Follow the description at the docker getting started

Note: If you are using boot2docker make sure you forward all ports from docker: http://docs.docker.io/en/latest/installation/mac/#forwarding-vm-port-range-to-host

This will start (and download if you never used it before) an image based on centos-6 with pre-installed Ambari 2.1.0 ready to install HDP 2.3. This git repository contains an ambari-functions script which will launch all the necessary containers to create a fully functional cluster. Download the file and source it:

. ambari-functions or source ambari-functions

Now you can issue commands with amb-prefix like:

amb-settings

To start a 3 node cluster:

amb-start-cluster 3

It will launch containers like this (1 Ambari server 2 agents 1 consul server):

CONTAINER ID        IMAGE                          COMMAND                  STATUS              NAMES
089f7f9e0b9e        sequenceiq/ambari:2.1.2-v1     "/start-agent"           Up 5 seconds        amb2
0bd64322fe07        sequenceiq/ambari:2.1.2-v1     "/start-agent"           Up 6 seconds        amb1
c7225f18fb0c        sequenceiq/ambari:2.1.2-v1     "/start-server"          Up 7 seconds        amb-server
bdca911bf416        sequenceiq/consul:v0.5.0-v6    "/bin/start -server -"   Up 13 seconds       amb-consul

Now you can reach the Ambari UI on the amb-server container's 8080 port. amb-settings for IP:

AMBARI_SERVER_IP=172.17.0.17

Once the container is running, you can deploy a cluster. Instead of going to the webui, we can use ambari-shell, which can interact with ambari via cli, or perform automated provisioning. We will use the automated way, and of course there is a docker image, with prepared ambari-shell in it:

amb-shell

Ambari-shell uses Ambari's new Blueprints capability. It just simple posts a cluster definition JSON to the ambari REST api, and 1 more json for cluster creation, where you specify which hosts go to which hostgroup.

Ambari shell will show the progress in the upper right corner. So grab a cup coffee, and after about 10 minutes, you have a ready HDP 2.3 cluster.

For the multi node Hadoop cluster instructions please read our blog entry or run this one-liner:

curl -Lo .amb j.mp/docker-ambari && . .amb && amb-deploy-cluster