Backup and Disaster Recovery in Hadoop

While you could be tempted assuming data is already safe in a single Hadoop cluster, in practice you have to plan for more. Questions like: "What happens if the entire datacenter fails?, or "How do I recover into a consistent state of data, so that applications can continue to run?" are not a all trivial to answer for Hadoop. Did you know that HDFS snapshots are handling open files not as immutable? Or that HBase snapshots are executed asynchronously across servers and therefore cannot guarantee atomicity for cross region updates (which includes tables)? There is no unified and coherent data backup strategy, nor is there tooling available for many of the included components to build such a strategy. The Hadoop distributions largely avoid this topic as most customers are still in the "single use-case" or PoC phase, where data governance as far as backup and disaster recovery (BDR) is concerned are not (yet) important. This talk first is introducing you to the overarching issue and difficulties of backup and data safety, looking at each of the many components in Hadoop, including HDFS, HBase, YARN, Oozie, the management components and so on, to finally show you a viable approach using built-in tools. You will also learn not to take this topic lightheartedly and what is needed to implement and guarantee a continuous operation of Hadoop cluster based solutions.