Cloudera Certified Administrator for Apache Hadoop (CCAH)

The exam pattern is set in such a way that it focuses on demonstrating the candidate’s technical knowledge, skill, and ability to configure, deploy, maintain and secure an Apache Hadoop cluster and the ecosystem projects that comprise the Enterprise Data Hub.

Skills of CCAH

HDFS – 17%

• Function of HDFS Daemons
• Normal operation of an Apache Hadoop cluster, in data storage as well as in data processing.
• Current features of computing systems that motivate a system like Apache Hadoop.
• Major goals of HDFS Design.
• Identify appropriate use case for HDFS Federation in a given scenario.
• Components and daemon of an HDFS HA-Quorum cluster.
• Analyze the role of HDFS security (Kerberos).
• Best data serialization choice for a given scenario.
• File read and write paths.
• Commands to manipulate files in the Hadoop file system shell.

YARN and MapReduce Version 2  – 17%

• Upgrading a cluster from Hadoop 1.0 to Hadoop 2.0.
• Deploy MRv2 / YARN with all YARN daemons.
• Design strategy for MRv2.
• How YARN handles resource allocations.
• Workflow of MapReduce job running on YARN
• Determine which files must be changed and how to migrate a cluster from MRv1 to MRv2 running on YARN.

Hadoop Cluster Planning – 16%

• Things to consider when choosing the hardware and operating systems for an Apache Hadoop cluster.
• Get insights on the choices for selecting an OS.
• Good knowledge kernel tuning and disk swapping.
• Establish a hardware configuration appropriate to a scenario.
• Identify the ecosystem components needed by the cluster to fulfil the SLA, in a given scenario.
• Find out the specifics for the workload, including CPU, memory, storage, disk I/O.
• Understand network usage in Hadoop and come up with a network design components for a given scenario.

Hadoop Cluster Installation and Administration – 25%

• How the cluster will handle disk and machine failures in a given scenario.
• Analyze logging configuration and its file format.
• Basics of Hadoop metrics and cluster wellness monitoring.
• Know the function and purpose of available tools for cluster monitoring.
• Install all the ecosystem components in CDH 5, like Impala, Flume, Oozie, Hue, Cloudera Manager, Sqoop, Hive, and Pig.
• Discern the function and purpose of available tools for managing the Apache Hadoop file system.

Resource Management – 10%

• Understand the overall design aspect and goals of each Hadoop scheduler.
• Know how the FIFO Scheduler allocates cluster resources.
• Determine how the Fair Scheduler allocates cluster resources under YARN.
• Determine how the Capacity Scheduler allocates cluster resources.

Monitoring and Logging – 15%

• Functions and features of Hadoop’s metric collection.
• Analyze the NameNode and JobTracker Web UIs.
• Monitor cluster Daemons.
• Identify and monitor CPU usage on master nodes.
• Know how to monitor swap and memory allocation on all nodes.
• View and manage Hadoop’s log files.
• Interpret a log file.