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YARN Fundamentals

Anushree Subramaniam gives us a primer on Apache YARN, the resource manager which drives Hadoop:

In Hadoop version 1.0 which is also referred to as MRV1(MapReduce Version 1), MapReduce performed both processing and resource management functions. It consisted of a Job Tracker which was the single master. The Job Tracker allocated the resources, performed scheduling and monitored the processing jobs. It assigned map and reduce tasks on a number of subordinate processes called the Task Trackers. The Task Trackers periodically reported their progress to the Job Tracker.

This design resulted in scalability bottleneck due to a single Job Tracker. IBM mentioned in its article that according to Yahoo!, the practical limits of such a design are reached with a cluster of 5000 nodes and 40,000 tasks running concurrently. Apart from this limitation, the utilization of computational resources is inefficient in MRV1. Also, the Hadoop framework became limited only to MapReduce processing paradigm.

To overcome all these issues, YARN was introduced in Hadoop version 2.0 in the year 2012 by Yahoo and Hortonworks. The basic idea behind YARN is to relieve MapReduce by taking over the responsibility of Resource Management and Job Scheduling. YARN started to give Hadoop the ability to run non-MapReduce jobs within the Hadoop framework.

There’s a lot of depth to YARN.