New Features and Changes in Cloudera Altus Director

Cloudera Director is now part of the Cloudera Altus platform. The full name of Cloudera Director is now Cloudera Altus Director.

The name change does not affect scripts, commands, or file names that use the short name Director or Cloudera.

By default, Altus Director 6.0 installs Cloudera Manager and CDH 6.0.

Altus Director 6.0 installs Java 8 with Cloudera Manager 6.0 and the CDH 6.0 instances managed by the Cloudera Manager 6.0 instance.

You can use Altus Director to install Cloudera Manager and CDH 5.7 or later versions if you specify the product version and parcel repositories in the Altus Director configuration file. When Altus Director 6.0 installs Cloudera Manager 5.7 or a later version, Altus Director 6.0 installs Java 7 with Cloudera Manager and the CDH instances managed by the Cloudera Manager.

You can install Altus Director on RHEL/CentOS 7.5 or Ubuntu 16.04.

Altus Director 6.0 requires Java 8.

Altus Director 6.0 does not support Java 7 or earlier versions. It also does not support Java 9 or later versions.

Altus Director 6.0 supports Cloudera Manager version 5.7 or higher.

Altus Director 6.0 does not work with Cloudera Manager instances earlier than version 5.7. Altus Director 6.0 will not start if it detects that a deployment running a version of Cloudera Manager earlier than 5.7

You can now encrypt the values of the properties in the Altus Director application.properties file using a master password.

As of Altus Director 6.0, when you create bootstrap, post-create, or pre-terminate scripts, you can provide each script as an object consisting of an ID string and the script content.

bootstrapScripts: [
  {
    id: "SCRIPT-01"
    content: """#!/bin/bash …
  }
]

You can use the new script model in addition to the previous model where you provide the script as an ordinary string.

Altus Director 6.0 uses the cloudera-centos-67-latest VM image for Azure clusters.

If you have existing clusters in Azure that you need to grow or if you have an operation where you need to use an existing template that uses the cloudera-centos-6-latest image, you can add the image definition to the images.conf file so you can continue to use the cloudera-centos-6-latest image.

cloudera-centos-6-latest {
     publisher: cloudera
     offer: cloudera-centos-os
     sku: 6_7
     version: latest
     }

Restart Altus Director 6.0 to load the new image definition.

Custom images.conf files are stored in the Azure plug-in directory. If you create a custom images.conf file in Altus Director 6.0, add the file to the following directory: /var/lib/cloudera-director-plugins/azure-provider-3.0.0/etc/

If you use other versions of the Azure plug-in for Director, update the images.conf file in the appropriate plug-in directory.

As of Altus Director 6.0, all new instance templates for Azure use Managed Disks. On the Altus Director 6.0 web UI, you can no longer create instance templates that use storage accounts. To create a cluster in Azure that uses storage accounts, you must use the Altus Director CLI.

As of Altus Director 6.0, the stand-alone commands are removed from the Altus Director client. The Altus Director client is now used only for command line interactions with the Altus Director server. If an Altus Director server is not available, you cannot run the Altus Director CLI commands.

For more information about the Altus Director command line interface, see Command Line Interface.

Altus Director 6.0 introduces version d6.0 of the Altus Director server API. Along with server API d6.0, Altus Director 6.0 supports server API versions v6 through v12. It no longer supports Director server API version v5 or earlier.

If you use an API version v5 or earlier, you must update your applications to use API v6 or later.

If you customized the renamed properties in previous versions, you must rename the properties in the application.properties for Altus Director 6.0. Altus Director 6.0 ignores properties in application.properties file that use obsolete names.

When you the CLI to launch a cluster, you can use a configuration file to customize the cluster setup. Altus Director provides sample configuration files that you can for your own use.

When you the CLI to launch a cluster, you can use a configuration file to customize the cluster setup. In Altus Director 6.0, a number of properties have been removed. If you use these properties in your cluster configuration file, update the file to use the correct property names. If you leave the property in the cluster configuration file, Altus Director ignores the property.

For more information about the cluster configuration file, see The Altus Director Configuration File.

As of Altus Director 6.0, you cannot enable Kerberos for a new Cloudera Manager deployment on the Altus Director web UI. The option for enabling Kerberos for a new Cloudera Manager deployment on the web UI is removed.

You must use a configuration file to enable Kerberos.

Code that uses Altus Director 2.x libraries does not work with the client libraries released with Altus Director 6.0. To use the new client libraries, you must update your code to match the changes in the client libraries.

You can continue to use Altus Director 2.x client libraries with Altus Director 6.0 through API versions v6 to v12. You need to update your code only if you want the code to work with the new client libraries released with Altus Director 6.0.

CDH 6.0 has changes that affect Altus Director usage. The changes are not part of Altus Director, but they affect use of Altus Director.

External Spark 2 Parcels Not Supported in CDH 6.0

Prior to CDH 6.0, the use of Spark 2 requires the use of a separate parcel. This is no longer necessary in CDH 6.0, which includes Spark 2.2. However, use of a different version of Spark 2 is not supported with CDH 6.0 through the use of an external parcel. Existing Altus Director configuration files that bring in Spark 2 through a parcel must be modified for CDH 6.0 to rely on Spark 2.2 as packaged with CDH.

Sqoop 2 Not Supported in CDH 6.0

Sqoop 2 is not packaged with CDH 6.0. Bootstrapping CDH 6.0 clusters that call for Sqoop 2 will fail under Altus Director 6.0. Instead, use Sqoop 1 (service "SQOOP_CLIENT" and role "GATEWAY").

Sqoop 2 is still supported for CDH 5.x clusters, but deprecated.

Hue Service in CDH 6.0 Requires Python 2.7 and a Psycopg adapter

The Hue service included in CDH 6.0 requires a Python version that may not be available in the operating systems. The Hue service also requires a Psycopg adapter version that is different from the version used by the Cloudera Manager 6.0 agent package.

Altus Director provides a bootstrap script that you can use to install the correct version of Python and Psycopg adapter library for Hue. For more information about the bootstrap script, see Hue service in CDH 6 that uses the wrong version of Python fails to start.