AWS considerations

We've not mentioned AWS so far in this chapter as there's been nothing in Sqoop that either supports or prevents its use on AWS. We can run Sqoop on an EC2 host as easily as on a local one, and it can access either a manually or EMR-created Hadoop cluster optionally running Hive. The only possible quirk when considering use in AWS is security group access as many default EC2 configurations will not allow traffic on the ports used by most relational databases (3306 by default for MySQL). But, that's no more of an issue than if our Hadoop cluster and MySQL database were to be located on different sides of a firewall or any other network security boundary.

Considering RDS

There is another AWS service that we've not mentioned before that does deserve an introduction now. Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) offers hosted relational databases in the cloud and provides MySQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server options. Instead of having to worry about the installation, configuration...