I recently put together a short training course on Spark. One of the initial components of the course involved deploying a Spark cluster on AWS. I wanted to have Jupyter Notebook and RStudio servers available on the master node too and the easiest way to make that happen was to install Docker and then run appropriate images.
There’s already a jupyter/pyspark-notebook image which includes Spark and Jupyter. It’s a simple matter to extend the rocker/verse image (which already includes RStudio server, the Tidyverse, devtools and some publishing utilities) to include the sparklyr package.
Creating an instance from either of these images immediately allows access to Spark from Python and R. However, I wanted to cover two topics that would not work immediately with either:
- access to files on S3 and
- streaming data from Kafka.
Both of these operations require additional Java artifacts. Specifically you need hadoop-aws, aws-java-sdk and spark-streaming-kafka.
Now it’s perfectly possible to download these manually and insert them into the appropriate location on a container. But you’d have to do that every time you launch a new container. Nobody has time for that.
Docker comes into its own in precisely this situation: adding new capabilities to an existing image. I’ve derived two new images which include these artifacts:
If you want to access S3 or Kafka from Spark, then pull and run one of these images. Feedback for how these images can be improved or extended is very welcome.
Jupyter with Spark
To pull and launch the datawookie/pyspark-notebook image:
docker pull datawookie/pyspark-notebook
docker run --name jupyter -p 8888:8888 datawookie/pyspark-notebook
RStudio with Spark
To pull and launch the datawookie/rstudio-sparklyr image:
deocker pull datawookie/rstudio-sparklyr
docker run --name rstudio -p 8787:8787 datawookie/rstudio-sparklyr