New Features and Changes in Cloudera Altus Director

By default, Altus Director 6.1 installs Cloudera Manager 6.1 and CDH 6.1.

Altus Director 6.1 installs Java 8 with Cloudera Manager 6.1 and the CDH 6.1 instances.

You can use Altus Director 6.1 to install Cloudera Manager and CDH 5.7.x or later 5.x versions if you specify the product version and parcel repositories in the Altus Director configuration file. When Altus Director 6.1 installs Cloudera Manager 5.7.x or a later 5.x version, Altus Director 6.1 installs Java 7 with Cloudera Manager and the CDH instances by default. You can configure the Java version that Altus Director 6.1 installs with Cloudera Manager 5.7.x or a later 5.x version.

Altus Director 6.1 introduces version d6.1 of the Altus Director server API.

Use the Altus Director API d6.1 to take advantage of features introduced in Altus Director 6.1. For more information, see the Altus Director SDK GitHub page.

Altus Director 6.1 supports OpenJDK in addition to Oracle JDK.

When you install Altus Director 6.1, you can choose to install Oracle JDK or OpenJDK. Altus Director 6.1 supports OpenJDK for the Director server and client and for Cloudera Manager and CDH clusters. Use the DIRECTOR_MANAGED installation strategy to install OpenJDK on the Cloudera Manager node and cluster instances.

When you deploy instances in Altus Director 6.1, the new instance template allows you to include a pre-terminate script. The pre-terminate script runs immediately before an instance is terminated.

You can use a pre-terminate script to clear out the cluster components that were set up with a bootstrap script. For example, you can use a pre-terminate script to clear a custom DNS, clean up networking, or save system logs before the cluster is terminated.

You can include environment variables in bootstrap, post-creation, or pre-terminate scripts. You can also assign an ID to a script to help you identify the script. For example, you can determine which script appears in a log based on its ID.

bootstrapScripts: [
   {
     id: Script-001,
     env {
        KEY1: VALUE1
        KEY2: VALUE2
     },
     content: “echo The values are $KEY1 and $KEY2”
   }
]

You can set the location where Altus Director runs scripts.

lp.ssh.tmpPath: /path/where/to/run/scripts

Altus Director runs all scripts for all clusters in the location you specify, including any bootstrap, post-creation, or pre-terminate scripts that you provide.

Altus Director 6.1 can be set up to run behind a proxy. If you run Altus Director on a cloud network that has limited outbound internet access, you can configure Altus Director to go through a proxy.

You can run Altus Director 6.1 with Cloudera Manager 6.x behind a non-authenticating HTTP proxy.

By default, Altus Director validates URLs in templates. If a URL is behind a proxy or is accessible only to Cloudera Manager but not to Altus Director, you can disable URL validation.

lp.validation.validateUrls: false

Note that if you set the validateUrls property to false, Altus Director cannot catch invalid URLs in deployment and cluster templates prior to bootstrapping.

Altus Director 6.1 now supports the use of subnetworks in Google Cloud Platform.

A Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network consists of one or more IP range partitions called subnetworks. Each subnetwork is associated with a region.

A subnetwork is also referred to as a subnet in Google Cloud Platform. For more information about VPC networks and subnetworks, see Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Network Overview.

Altus Director 6.1 on Azure provides a VM image for CentOS and RHEL 7.5.

When you modify clusters, Altus Director now validates images only for instances in new or growing instance groups.

Existing groups that are not changing or are shrinking can continue to refer to deleted images. Only a new or growing group must refer to a valid image.

Previously, Altus Director validated images in all instance groups. Unchanged groups or shrinking groups that referred to a deleted image generated errors.

After you upgrade to version 6.1, Altus Director disables sudo requiretty on all existing cluster instances.

Altus Director 6.1 disables sudo requiretty to remove the need to allocate tty or pty for running commands under sudo on cluster instances. This is necessary because Altus Director 6.1 has changed the way it runs commands on instances.