Apache Ambari

                                 Apache Ambari

Apache Ambari is a tool for provisioning, managing, and monitoring Apache Hadoop clusters. Ambari consists of a set of RESTful APIs and a browser-based management interface. 

Ambari Usage:

• Provision a Hadoop Cluster
• Ambari provides an easy-to-use, step-by-step wizard for installing Hadoop services across any number of hosts.
• Ambari handles configuration of Hadoop services for the cluster.
• Manage a Hadoop Cluster
• Ambari provides central management for starting, stopping, and reconfiguring Hadoop services across the entire cluster.
• Monitor a Hadoop Cluster
• Ambari provides a dashboard for monitoring health and status of the Hadoop cluster.
• Ambari will send emails when your attention is needed (e.g., a node goes down, remaining disk space is low, etc).

In addition, it is very flexible and scalable user-interface which permits a range of tools, for example, Pig, MapReduce, Hive, and many more to be installed on the cluster and 
administers their performances in a user-friendly fashion.

Features of Ambari

a. Platform independent
Apache Ambari architecturally supports any hardware and software systems that’s why it runs in Windows, Mac and many other platforms. Apart from them, Ubuntu, SLES, RHEL etc are platforms where Ambari runs.

b. Pluggable component
It is possible to customize any current Ambari application. 

c. Version management and upgrade
There is no need of external tools like Git since Ambari itself maintains versions. It is quite easy if we need to upgrade any Ambari application or even Ambari.

d. Extensibility
By adding different view components, we can extend the functionality of existing Ambari applications.

e. Failure recovery
Ambari application supports failure recovery well.

f. Security
The Ambari application can sync with LDAP over the active directory, that says it comes with robust security.

Apache Ambari Architecture

Apache Ambari follows a master/slave architecture where the master node instructs the slave nodes to perform certain actions and report back the state of every action. The master node is responsible for keeping track of the state of the infrastructure.

Ambari vs ZooKeeper

It is one of the misconceptions that Zookeeper and Ambari perform similar kind of tasks. Although, there is some difference between them, such as:
a. Basic Task
i. Apache Ambari
The basic task of Ambari is to perform monitoring, provisioning and managing Hadoop cluster
ii. Apache ZooKeeper
On the other hand, Zookeeper maintains configuration information as well as naming and synchronizing of the cluster.

b. Nature
i. Apache Ambari
The Web interface
ii.Apache Zookeeper
The Open-source server.

c. Status maintenance
i. Apache Ambari
In Ambari, APIs maintains status.
ii. Apache Zookeeper
On the other hand, ZNodes maintains status.


Let me show how Ambari looks in a system