SAP-C02 Practice Question 99: Hadoop Spark Transient EMR S3

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02) · Test 10 · question 9 of 10

Migration and Modernizationmedium

A company runs an on-premises Hadoop cluster of 300 nodes whose HDFS storage keeps growing. Nightly Apache Spark and Hive jobs run for about six hours, and the cluster sits mostly idle the rest of the day. The jobs use custom JAR files, tuned Spark settings and a shared Hive metastore. The company wants to cut cost by decoupling storage from compute and paying for compute only while the jobs run, with minimal changes to the job code.

Which migration approach best meets these requirements?

Show answer and explanation

Answer:

D. Move the data to Amazon S3 and run the jobs on transient Amazon EMR clusters with the AWS Glue Data Catalog as the Hive metastore

Amazon EMR is *"a managed cluster platform that simplifies running big data frameworks, such as Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark, on AWS,"* and it can move data into and out of stores such as Amazon S3. Keeping the data in S3 decouples storage from compute, and a cluster can be created for the nightly run and terminated afterward, so the company pays for compute only while the jobs run. The existing Spark and Hive code, custom JARs and configurations carry over. AWS recommends the AWS Glue Data Catalog as the Hive metastore *"when you require a persistent metastore or a metastore shared by different clusters, services, applications, or AWS accounts"*, which replaces the on-premises metastore (option D).

- A is wrong because a 24-hour cluster with HDFS on EBS keeps storage and compute coupled and pays for idle capacity, which is the cost problem. - B is wrong because rewriting large Spark and Hive jobs as Lambda functions is a major code change, and Lambda's time and memory limits do not suit multi-hour batch jobs. - C is wrong because moving to Redshift requires rewriting every job as SQL, which contradicts the requirement for minimal code changes.

Reference: What is Amazon EMR?

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