Setting up the VM

Setting up a cluster is a long and difficult operation; senior big data engineers earn their (high) salaries not just downloading and executing a binary application, but skillfully and carefully adapting the cluster manager to the desired working environment. It's a tough and complex operation; it may take a long time and if results are below the expectations, the whole business (including data scientists and software developers) won't be able to be productive. Data engineers must know every small detail of the nodes, data, operations that will be carried out, and network before starting to build the cluster. The output is usually a balanced, adaptive, fast, and reliable cluster, which can be used for years by all the technical people in the company.

Note

Is a cluster with a low number of very powerful nodes better than a cluster with many less powerful servers? The answer should be evaluated case-by-case, and it's highly dependent on the data, processing algorithms, number...