In a previous post, we explained how to configure a proxy server to provide load balancing for the Impala daemon. The proxy software used was HAproxy, a free, open source load balancer. This post will demonstrate how to use Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) to perform Impala load balancing when running in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Details Similar to HAproxy, an Elastic Load Balancer is a reverse proxy that will take incoming TCP connections and distribute them amongst a set of EC2 instances. This is done partly for fault tolerance and partly for load distribution. Cloudera’s Using Impala through a Proxy for High Availability details how load balancing applies to part of Impala. To summarize, the proxy will allow us to configure our Impala clients (Hue, Tableau, etc) with a single hostname and port. This well-known hostname will not have to be changed out if there were to be…
Tag: aws
Fixing an AWS EC2 Instance Boot Up Issue
Background We recently had a problem with one of our AWS EC2 Instances after shutting it down, making some configuration changes and starting it back up. We were unable to SSH onto the machines despite the fact that the machine came up OK (we would keep getting a Connection Refused error). We reviewed the Security Group settings, Network Settings, reverted our configuration changes, made sure we were pointing to the correct IP address and much more, but we still couldn’t SSH onto the machine. Upon viewing the system logs, we noticed that one of the disk volumes failed to be mounted onto the machine. It was an Instance Store drive that apparently was remounted onto the machine after restarting it under a different device name. This prevented the boot up from completing, which as a result prevented the sshd daemon from being started up to allow us to SSH onto the machine. With us not being…