Architecting HBase Applications

Chapter 3. HBase Ecosystem

As we know, HBase is designed as part of the Hadoop ecosystem. The good news is that when creating new applications, HBase comes with a robust ecosystem. This should come as no surprise, as HBase is typically featured in a role of serving production data or powering customer applications. There are a variety of tools surrounding HBase, ranging from SQL query layers, ACID compliant transactional systems, management systems, and client libraries. In-depth coverage of every application for HBase will not be provided here, as the topic would require a book in and of itself. We will review the most prominent tools and discuss some of the pros and cons behind them. We will look at a few of the most interesting features of the top ecosystem tools.

Monitoring Tools

One of the hottest topics around Hadoop, and HBase in general, is management and monitoring tools. Having supported both Hadoop and HBase for numerous years, we can testify that any management software is better than none at all. Seriously, take the worst thing you can think of (like drowning in a vat of yellow mustard, or whatever scares you the most); then double it, and that is debugging a distributed system without any support. Hadoop/HBase is configured through XML files, which you can create manually. That said, there are two primary tools for deploying HBase clusters in the Hadoop ecosystem. The first one is Cloudera Manager, and the second is Apache Ambari. Both tools are capable of deploying, ...