Setting up the technology stack
In Chapter 1, Hadoop and Big Data, we covered various tools in the Hadoop ecosystem. In this chapter, we will use some of those tools to set up the technology stack for building a 360-degree view of a customer. Setting up all the tools in the Hadoop ecosystem can be cumbersome and a fault-prone process, owing to multiple dependencies on the libraries. The tools in the Hadoop ecosystem have evolved over a period of time by contributions from the open source community. Therefore, these tools lack an integrated installation and configuration approach. The Pure Play Hadoop vendors have made good progress in easing the installation of Hadoop by offering Hadoop sandboxes and RPM packages. One such vendor is Hortonworks who offer the Hortonwork Data Platform or HDP. HDP is a pure open source platform built upon open source Hadoop, and several tools from the Hadoop ecosystem.
HDP is available on a CentOS-based virtual machine such as a VirtualBox image. We will...