In addition to running on the Mesos or YARN cluster managers, Spark also provides a simple standalone deploy mode. You can launch a standalone cluster either manually, by starting a master and workers by hand, or use our provided [launch scripts](#cluster-launch-scripts). It is also possible to run these daemons on a single machine for testing.
To install Spark Standalone mode, you simply place a compiled version of Spark on each node on the cluster. You can obtain pre-built versions of Spark with each release or [build it yourself](index.html#building).
<td>Total amount of memory to allow Spark applications to use on the machine, in a format like 1000M or 2G (default: your machine's total RAM minus 1 GB); only on worker</td>
To launch a Spark standalone cluster with the launch scripts, you need to create a file called `conf/slaves` in your Spark directory, which should contain the hostnames of all the machines where you would like to start Spark workers, one per line. The master machine must be able to access each of the slave machines via password-less `ssh` (using a private key). For testing, you can just put `localhost` in this file.
Once you've set up this file, you can launch or stop your cluster with the following shell scripts, based on Hadoop's deploy scripts, and available in `SPARK_HOME/bin`:
Note that these scripts must be executed on the machine you want to run the Spark master on, not your local machine.
You can optionally configure the cluster further by setting environment variables in `conf/spark-env.sh`. Create this file by starting with the `conf/spark-env.sh.template`, and _copy it to all your worker machines_ for the settings to take effect. The following settings are available:
<td>Total amount of memory to allow Spark applications to use on the machine, e.g. <code>1000m</code>, <code>2g</code> (default: total memory minus 1 GB); note that each application's <i>individual</i> memory is configured using its <code>spark.executor.memory</code> property.</td>
You may also run your application entirely inside of the cluster by submitting your application driver using the submission client. The syntax for submitting applications is as follows:
application-jar-url: Path to a bundled jar including your application and all dependencies. Currently, the URL must be globally visible inside of your cluster, for instance, an `hdfs://` path or a `file://` path that is present on all nodes.
Spark's standalone mode offers a web-based user interface to monitor the cluster. The master and each worker has its own web UI that shows cluster and job statistics. By default you can access the web UI for the master at port 8080. The port can be changed either in the configuration file or via command-line options.
In addition, detailed log output for each job is also written to the work directory of each slave node (`SPARK_HOME/work` by default). You will see two files for each job, `stdout` and `stderr`, with all output it wrote to its console.
You can run Spark alongside your existing Hadoop cluster by just launching it as a separate service on the same machines. To access Hadoop data from Spark, just use a hdfs:// URL (typically `hdfs://<namenode>:9000/path`, but you can find the right URL on your Hadoop Namenode's web UI). Alternatively, you can set up a separate cluster for Spark, and still have it access HDFS over the network; this will be slower than disk-local access, but may not be a concern if you are still running in the same local area network (e.g. you place a few Spark machines on each rack that you have Hadoop on).
By default, standalone scheduling clusters are resilient to Worker failures (insofar as Spark itself is resilient to losing work by moving it to other workers). However, the scheduler uses a Master to make scheduling decisions, and this (by default) creates a single point of failure: if the Master crashes, no new applications can be created. In order to circumvent this, we have two high availability schemes, detailed below.
Utilizing ZooKeeper to provide leader election and some state storage, you can launch multiple Masters in your cluster connected to the same ZooKeeper instance. One will be elected "leader" and the others will remain in standby mode. If the current leader dies, another Master will be elected, recover the old Master's state, and then resume scheduling. The entire recovery process (from the time the the first leader goes down) should take between 1 and 2 minutes. Note that this delay only affects scheduling _new_ applications -- applications that were already running during Master failover are unaffected.
Learn more about getting started with ZooKeeper [here](http://zookeeper.apache.org/doc/trunk/zookeeperStarted.html).
<td>The directory in ZooKeeper to store recovery state (default: /spark).</td>
</tr>
</table>
Possible gotcha: If you have multiple Masters in your cluster but fail to correctly configure the Masters to use ZooKeeper, the Masters will fail to discover each other and think they're all leaders. This will not lead to a healthy cluster state (as all Masters will schedule independently).
After you have a ZooKeeper cluster set up, enabling high availability is straightforward. Simply start multiple Master processes on different nodes with the same ZooKeeper configuration (ZooKeeper URL and directory). Masters can be added and removed at any time.
In order to schedule new applications or add Workers to the cluster, they need to know the IP address of the current leader. This can be accomplished by simply passing in a list of Masters where you used to pass in a single one. For example, you might start your SparkContext pointing to ``spark://host1:port1,host2:port2``. This would cause your SparkContext to try registering with both Masters -- if ``host1`` goes down, this configuration would still be correct as we'd find the new leader, ``host2``.
There's an important distinction to be made between "registering with a Master" and normal operation. When starting up, an application or Worker needs to be able to find and register with the current lead Master. Once it successfully registers, though, it is "in the system" (i.e., stored in ZooKeeper). If failover occurs, the new leader will contact all previously registered applications and Workers to inform them of the change in leadership, so they need not even have known of the existence of the new Master at startup.
Due to this property, new Masters can be created at any time, and the only thing you need to worry about is that _new_ applications and Workers can find it to register with in case it becomes the leader. Once registered, you're taken care of.
ZooKeeper is the best way to go for production-level high availability, but if you just want to be able to restart the Master if it goes down, FILESYSTEM mode can take care of it. When applications and Workers register, they have enough state written to the provided directory so that they can be recovered upon a restart of the Master process.
* This solution can be used in tandem with a process monitor/manager like [monit](http://mmonit.com/monit/), or just to enable manual recovery via restart.
* While filesystem recovery seems straightforwardly better than not doing any recovery at all, this mode may be suboptimal for certain development or experimental purposes. In particular, killing a master via stop-master.sh does not clean up its recovery state, so whenever you start a new Master, it will enter recovery mode. This could increase the startup time by up to 1 minute if it needs to wait for all previously-registered Workers/clients to timeout.
* While it's not officially supported, you could mount an NFS directory as the recovery directory. If the original Master node dies completely, you could then start a Master on a different node, which would correctly recover all previously registered Workers/applications (equivalent to ZooKeeper recovery). Future applications will have to be able to find the new Master, however, in order to register.
