What Is A Hadoop Administrator?

In the following, we’ll be discussing a crucial topic that’s “What is a Hadoop administrator?” and will discuss it thoroughly within the article. With increased enterprise adoption of Hadoop, organizations or companies require Hadoop administrators to take care of their large/massive Hadoop clusters. The job role of a Hadoop administrator is influential, and the job’s outlook is healthy.

A Hadoop administrator’s job role is unspectacular however is essential/vital to keep Hadoop clusters running smoothly in production. Hence, a Hadoop admin job involves being the nuts as well as bolts of the business. Some individuals have a reasonably fizzy idea of what a Hadoop Administrator does and how to become one. We decided to take a detailed look at Hadoop Admin job roles and responsibilities, and the path prospective Hadoop admins will take to pursue a career in Hadoop administration.

Security incidents such as Sony Hack, Target Malware attacks, or even the Home Depot hack remind us that technology is only 1 part of the play. There are others, such as management, users, administrators, and other stakeholders. All are equally necessary within the opera of business, but one area can destroy or accelerate the performance of the business quickly.
Avoiding a lousy performance takes teamwork or group work; however, the play’s stage manager (administrator) has a key or primary role in building and maintaining the performance. If an administrator’s job responsibilities don’t go well, the system’s performance might not go well. Enter the stage manager of the massive data world, the “Hadoop Administrator.”

Who Is A Hadoop Administrator?

As the name suggests, a Hadoop Administrator administers and manages Hadoop clusters and, simultaneously, all other resources in the entire Hadoop ecosystem. A Hadoop admin’s job isn’t visible to other IT teams or end-users. The role of a Hadoop Admin is mainly or primarily associated with tasks that involve installing and monitoring Hadoop clusters.

Hadoop Admin job responsibilities might include some mundane tasks. However, each one is necessary for the efficient and continued operation of Hadoop clusters to prevent problems and enhance the overall performance. A Hadoop admin is the individual who is responsible for keeping the company’s Hadoop clusters safe as well as running efficiently altogether.

Hadoop Admin Job Roles And Responsibilities

Managing massive data and Hadoop clusters present numerous challenges to Hadoop admins with running test data through a couple of machines. Many times, organizational deployments of Hadoop fail as the admins try to replicate the procedures and processes tested on one or two different types of devices across more complex Hadoop clusters.

Hadoop Admins is a title that covers various niches in the massive data world: depending on the size of the company they work for, Hadoop administrators may also perform DBA-like tasks with HBase and Hive databases, security administration, and cluster administration. Instead of attempting to put a Hadoop admin in a pigeonhole, it’s helpful to take a look at what day-to-day activities a Hadoop Admin does as follow:

  • The typical or general responsibilities of a Hadoop admin include – deploying a Hadoop cluster and then maintaining a Hadoop cluster, adding as well as removing nodes using cluster monitoring tools such as the Ganglia Nagios or Cloudera Manager, configuring the NameNode high availability as well as keeping track of all the running Hadoop jobs.
  • Implementing, managing as well as administering the overall Hadoop infrastructure.
  • Another responsibility is to take care of the day-to-day running of Hadoop clusters.
  • A Hadoop administrator will have to work closely with the database, BI, network, and application teams to ensure that all the big data applications are highly available and performing as expected.

Suppose working with open sources Apache Distribution, then Hadoop administrators have to manually set up all the configurations- Core-Site, YARN-Site, HDFS-Site, and Map Red-Site. Nevertheless, when working with popular/famous Hadoop distributions such as Hortonworks, Cloudera, or MapR, the configuration files are set up on startup, and the Hadoop admin need not configure them manually.
Hadoop admin is responsible for capacity planning and estimating the requirements for increasing or lowering the capacity of the Hadoop cluster.

  • The Hadoop administrator is also responsible for deciding the size of the Hadoop cluster based on the data stored in HDFS.
  • Make sure that the Hadoop cluster is up and running all the time.
  • Monitoring cluster connectivity and performance.
  • Manage and review Hadoop log files.
  • Backup and recovery tasks
  • Resource and security management
  • Troubleshooting application errors as well as making sure that they do not occur again.