How To Create a Multitenant Enterprise Data Hub

Multitenancy in an enterprise data hub (EDH) lets you share the collective resources of your CDH clusters between user groups without impacting application performance or compromising security.

Advantages of multitenancy include opportunities for data sharing, consolidated operations, improved performance, and better use of resources.

This topic walks through the steps to create a multitenant enterprise data hub:

Choosing an Isolation Model

There are three standard isolation models for an EDH: Share Nothing, Share Management, Share Resources.



Share Nothing

In a share nothing architecture, both management and data are completely separate. Nothing is shared between clusters. This architecture does not provide the benefits of multitenancy, but IT teams might find it appropriate based on specific operational realities and governance policies.

For example, specific company contracts or policies might force an enterprise IT team to use this model. Another common example is security and data privacy mandates that restrict the transfer of data sets across geographical boundaries.

Share Management

A shared management model offers the benefits of reduced operational overhead without sharing cluster resources or data between groups. This approach is a middle ground, granting some of the benefits of multitenancy while maintaining isolation at the cluster level. This is the preferred choice for environments where full multitenancy is not appropriate. For example, enterprises commonly employ this model for purpose-built, high-priority clusters that cannot risk any performance issues or resource contention, such as an ad serving system or retail personalization, “next offer” engine. While a multitenant EDH always faces the risks of misconfigured applications or malicious users, this model mitigates these risks at the cost of data sharing and resource pooling.

Share Data

The shared resource model uses full multitenancy with all the benefits from consolidated management to shared data and resources. It represents the desired end state for many EDH operators. For example, a biotechnology firm can harness the entire body and insight of research, trial data, and individual perspectives from all its research teams and other departments by employing a full multitenant EDH to store and analyze its information, greatly accelerating innovation through transparency and accessibility.

Balancing Criticality and Commonality

Enterprise IT teams often discover that multitenancy is not necessarily a good fit for their mission-critical workloads running uniquely tailored data sets. Multitenancy can be extremely useful for less critical workloads that employ shared data sets by reducing unnecessary or burdensome data duplication and synchronization. For most situations where business units share data, but the specific workloads are critical to the organization, the overarching business priorities and SLA goals drive the choice of a multitenant or isolated architecture. For some, the risk of latency and resource contention weighs heavily on their performance goals, and would suggest a shared management model. Others consider data visibility paramount, such as for fraud detection and insider threat analysis, which would warrant a shared resource model.

Configuring Security

Once you settle on an isolation model, you can choose the security elements to support your model.

Security for Hadoop is clearly critical in both single tenant and multitenant environments. It establishes the foundation for trusted data and usage among the various actors in the business environment. Without such trust, enterprises cannot rely on the resources and information when making business-critical decisions, which in turn undermines the benefits of operational consolidation and the decreased friction of shared data and insights. Cloudera’s EDH provides a rich set of tools and frameworks for security. Key elements of this strategy and its systems include:
  • Authentication, which proves users are who they say they are.
  • Authorization, which determines what users are allowed to see and do.
  • Auditing, which determines who did what, and when.
  • Data Protection, which encrypts data-at-rest and in-motion.
Cloudera’s EDH offers additional tools, such as network connectivity management and data masking. For further information on how IT teams can enable enterprise-grade security measures and policies for multitenant clusters, see Securing Your Enterprise Hadoop Ecosystem. In the context of multitenant administration, security requirements should also include:

Delegating Security Management

A central IT team tends to become the bottleneck in granting permissions to individuals and teams to specific data sets when handling large numbers of data sources with different access policies. Organizations can use Apache Sentry, the open source role-based access control (RBAC) system for Hadoop, to delegate permissions management for given data sets. Using this approach, local data administrators are responsible for assigning access for those data sets to the appropriate individuals and teams.

For more information, see Authorization With Apache Sentry.

Managing Auditor Access

For most large multitenant clusters, audit teams typically need access to data audit trails. For example, an audit team might need to monitor usage patterns for irregular behavior such as spikes in request access to credit card details or other sensitive information, without having full access to the cluster and its resources and data. Enterprise IT teams often adhere to the best practice of “least privilege” and restrict operational access to the minimum data and activity set required. For these cases, Cloudera Navigator provides a data auditor role that partitions the management rights to the cluster so that administrators can grant the audit team access only to the informational data needed, mitigating the impact to operations and security. This approach also answers the common request of audit teams to simplify and focus the application user interface.

For more information, see Cloudera Navigator Auditing.

Managing Data Visibility

Data visibility, in particular for the cluster administrator, is another security requirement that is prominent in most multitenant environments, especially those under strict compliance policies or regulations. Typical security approaches encrypt data, both on-disk and in-use, so that only users with the correct access can view data. Even administrators without proper access cannot view data stored on Hadoop. Cloudera Navigator provides data encryption and enterprise-grade key management with encrypt and key trustee, out-of-the-box.

For more information, see Cloudera Navigator Encryption.

Managing Resource Isolation

IT administrators must manage another crucial aspect of running a multitenant environment: facilitating the fair and equitable usage of finite cluster resources across different users and workloads. Typically, this is a result of aggregating resources to drive improved performance and utilization, a key business driver for multitenancy. Multiple groups within the organization finance the operations of this resource pool to meet this goal. As an outcome of many of these financing models, EDH administrators require systems to grant proportional access to this pool based on the proportion of payment. In addition, a successful multitenant environment employs these tools and frameworks to let users meet SLAs for critical workloads, even in the presence of unpredictable usage stemming from multiple, simultaneous workloads and ill-constructed or misconfigured processes.

Managing Resources

The practical batch processing engine of Hadoop, MapReduce, provides a scheduler framework that administrators can configure to ensure multiple, simultaneous user jobs share physical resources. More specifically, many production environments have successful implementations of the Fair Scheduler. These environments provide maximum utilization while enforcing SLAs through assigned resource minimums.

For more information, see Configuring the Fair Scheduler.

Defining Tenants with Dynamic Resource Pools

With the advent of computing capabilities such as Impala and Cloudera Search and a growing ecosystem of partner applications built to take advantage of CDH and the elements of Cloudera’s EDH, cluster faculties and data are increasingly shared with systems that do not operate within the original management framework of MapReduce. A resource management solution must take the full range of these systems into account. To address this challenge, Cloudera’s EDH and the underlying Hadoop platform, CDH, ship with the YARN resource management framework. In this context, YARN becomes a building block for computing engines to coordinate consumption and usage reservations to ensure resources are fairly allocated and used. This approach is sometimes referred to as dynamic partitioning.

Currently, Impala, MapReduce, and other well designed YARN applications participate in dynamic partitioning in CDH. IT administrators should also consider, with respect to the scheduler capability, how best to regulate tenant access to specified allocations (also known as pools) of resources. For example, IT teams might want to balance allocations between the processing needs for their marketing team’s near real-time campaign dashboards and their finance department’s SLA-driven quarterly compliance and reporting jobs. These administrative needs also extend to multiple applications within a single group. For example, the finance team must balance their quarterly reporting efforts with the daily expense report summaries. To achieve these goals, Hadoop and YARN support Access Control Lists for the various resource schedulers, ensuring that a user (or application) or group of users can only access a given resource pool.

For more information, see Dynamic Resource Pools.

Using Static Partitioning

While dynamic partitioning with YARN offers the IT administrator immense flexibility from a resource management perspective, IT teams operate applications that are not built on the YARN framework or require hard boundaries for resource allocation in order to separate them fully from other services in the cluster. Typically, these applications are purpose-built and by design do not permit this degree of resource flexibility.

To satisfy these business cases, Cloudera’s EDH, through Cloudera Manager, supports a static partitioning model, which leverages a technology available on modern Linux operating systems called container groups (cgroups). In this model, IT administrators specify policies within the host operating system to restrict a particular service or application to a given allocation of cluster resources. For instance, the IT administrator can choose to partition a cluster by limiting an Apache HBase service to a maximum of 50% of the cluster resources and allotting the remaining 50% to a YARN service and its associated dynamic partitioning in order to accommodate the business SLAs and workloads handled by each of these services.

For more information, see Static Resource Pools.

Using Impala Admission Control

Within the constraints of the static service pool, you can further subdivide Impala's resources using Admission Control.

You use Admission Control to divide usage between Dynamic Resource Pools in multitenant use cases. Allocating resources judiciously allows your most important queries to run faster and more reliably.

For more information, see Managing Impala Admission Control.

Managing Quotas

Fair distribution of resources is essential for keeping tenants happy and productive.

While resource management systems ensure appropriate access and minimum resource amounts for running applications, IT administrators must also carefully govern cluster resources in terms of disk usage in a multitenant environment. Like resource management, disk management is a balance of business objectives and requirements across a range of user communities. The underlying storage foundation of a Hadoop-based EDH, the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), supports quota mechanisms that administrators use to manage space usage by cluster tenants.

HDFS Utilization Reporting

Cloudera Manager reports let you keep track disk usage (storage space information) and directory usage (file metadata, such as size, owner, and last access date). You can use these reports to inform your decisions regarding quotas.

For more information, see Disk Usage Reports and Directory Usage Reports.

Managing Storage Quotas

Administrators can set disk space limits on a per-directory basis. This quota prevents users from accidentally or maliciously consuming too much disk space within the cluster, which can impact the operations of HDFS, similar to other file systems.

For more information, see Setting HDFS Quotas.

Managing Name Quotas

Name quotas are similar to disk quotas. Administrators use them to limit the number of files or subdirectories within a particular directory. This quota helps IT administrators optimize the metadata subsystem (NameNode) within the Hadoop cluster.

Name quotas and disk space quotas are the primary tools for administrators to make sure that tenants have access only to an appropriate portion of disk and name resources, much like the resource allocations mentioned in the previous section, and cannot adversely affect the operations of other tenants through their misuse of the shared file system.

For more information, see Setting HDFS Quotas.

Monitoring and Alerting

Resource and quota management controls are critical to smooth cluster operations. Even with these tools and systems, administrators have to plan for unforeseen situations such as an errant job or process that overwhelms an allotted resource partition for a single group and requires investigation and possible response.

Cloudera Manager provides Hadoop administrators a rich set of reporting and alerting tools that can be used to identify dangerous situations like low disk space conditions; once identified, Cloudera Manager can generate and send alerts to a network operations center (NOC) dashboard or an on-call resource via pager for immediate response.

For more information, see Introduction to Cloudera Manager Monitoring.

Implementing Showback and Chargeback

A common requirement for multitenant environments is the ability to meter the cluster usage of different tenants. As mentioned, one of the key business drivers of multitenancy is the aggregation of resources to improve utilization and performance. The multiple participants build internal budgets to finance this resource pool. In many organizations, IT departments use the metered information to drive showback or chargeback models and illustrate compliance.

Cluster Utilization Reporting

Cluster Utilization Report screens in Cloudera Manager display aggregated utilization information for YARN and Impala jobs. The reports display CPU utilization, memory utilization, resource allocations made due to the YARN fair scheduler, and Impala queries. The report displays aggregated utilization for the entire cluster and also breaks out utilization by tenant. You can configure the report to display utilization for a range of dates, specific days of the week, and time ranges.

Cluster utilization reporting lets you answer key questions such as:
  • “How much CPU and memory did each tenant use?”
  • “I set up fair scheduler. Did each of my tenants get their fair share?”
  • “Which tenants had to wait the longest for their applications to get resources?
  • “Which tenants asked for the most memory but used the least?”
  • “When do I need to add nodes to my cluster?”

For more information, see Cluster Utilization Reports.