Seven Databases in Seven Weeks, 2nd Edition

Day 3: Taking It to the Cloud

On Days 1 and 2, you got quite a lot of hands-on experience using HBase in standalone mode. Our experimentation so far has focused on accessing a single local server. But in reality, if you choose to use HBase, you’ll want to have a good-sized cluster in order to realize the performance benefits of its distributed architecture. And nowadays, there’s also an increasingly high chance that you’ll want to run it in the cloud.

Here on Day 3, let’s turn our attention toward operating and interacting with a remote HBase cluster. First, you’ll deploy an HBase cluster on Amazon Web Services’ Elastic MapReduce platform (more commonly known as AWS and EMR, respectively) using AWS’s command-line tool, appropriately named ...