Start-up activities and responsibilities of a Hadoop Admin

The world is witnessing the rapid generation of big data from various sectors and industries. And Hadoop, being the best big data management tool, it is adopted by more and more traditional enterprise IT solutions and also there is a significant increase in the number of Hadoop implementations in production environment, the need for Hadoop Operations and Administration experts to take care of the large Hadoop Clusters is becoming vital.

Hadoop Admin Responsibilities:

• Responsible for implementation and ongoing administration of Hadoop infrastructure.

• Aligning with the systems engineering team to propose and deploy new hardware and software environments required for Hadoop and to expand existing environments.

• Working with data delivery teams to setup new Hadoop users. This job includes setting up Linux users, setting up Kerberos principals and testing HDFS, Hive, Pig and MapReduce access for the new users.

• Cluster maintenance as well as creation and removal of nodes using tools like Ganglia, Nagios, Cloudera Manager Enterprise, Dell Open Manage and other tools.

• Performance tuning of Hadoop clusters and Hadoop MapReduce routines.

• Screen Hadoop cluster job performances and capacity planning

• Monitor Hadoop cluster connectivity and security

• Manage and review Hadoop log files.

• File system management and monitoring.

• HDFS support and maintenance.

• Diligently teaming with the infrastructure, network, database, application and business intelligence teams to guarantee high data quality and availability.

• Collaborating with application teams to install operating system and Hadoop updates, patches, version upgrades when required.

• Point of Contact for Vendor escalation

DBA Responsibilities Performed by Hadoop Administrator:

• Data modeling, design & implementation based on recognized standards.

• Software installation and configuration.

• Database backup and recovery.

• Database connectivity and security.

• Performance monitoring and tuning.

• Disk space management.

• Software patches and upgrades.

• Automate manual tasks.

DWH Development Responsibilities Performed by Hadoop Administrator:

DWH admins job responsibilities include developing, testing and monitoring batch jobs for the following tasks:

• Ensure Referential integrity.

• Perform primary key execution.

• Accomplish data restatements.

• Load large data volumes in a timely manner.

Now that you know about the job responsibilities of a Hadoop administrator, let’s take a look at the skills required to be one.

Skills required for becoming Hadoop Administrator: 

• General operational expertise such as good troubleshooting skills, understanding of system’s capacity, bottlenecks, basics of memory, CPU, OS, storage, and networks.

• Hadoop skills like HBase, Hive, Pig, Mahout, etc.

• The most essential requirements are: They should be able to deploy Hadoop cluster, add and remove nodes, keep track of jobs, monitor critical parts of the cluster, configure name-node high availability, schedule and configure it and take backups.

• Good knowledge of Linux as Hadoop runs on Linux.

• Familiarity with open source configuration management and deployment tools such as Puppet or Chef and Linux scripting.

• Knowledge of Troubleshooting Core Java Applications is a plus.