---
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displayTitle: Integration with Cloud Infrastructures
title: Integration with Cloud Infrastructures
description: Introduction to cloud storage support in Apache Spark SPARK_VERSION_SHORT
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{:toc}

## Introduction


All major cloud providers offer persistent data storage in *object stores*.
These are not classic "POSIX" file systems.
In order to store hundreds of petabytes of data without any single points of failure,
object stores replace the classic file system directory tree
with a simpler model of `object-name => data`. To enable remote access, operations
on objects are usually offered as (slow) HTTP REST operations.

Spark can read and write data in object stores through filesystem connectors implemented
in Hadoop or provided by the infrastructure suppliers themselves.
These connectors make the object stores look *almost* like file systems, with directories and files
and the classic operations on them such as list, delete and rename.


### Important: Cloud Object Stores are Not Real Filesystems

While the stores appear to be filesystems, underneath
they are still object stores, [and the difference is significant](https://hadoop.apache.org/docs/current/hadoop-project-dist/hadoop-common/filesystem/introduction.html)

They cannot be used as a direct replacement for a cluster filesystem such as HDFS
*except where this is explicitly stated*.

Key differences are:

* The means by which directories are emulated may make working with them slow.
* Rename operations may be very slow and, on failure, leave the store in an unknown state.
* Seeking within a file may require new HTTP calls, hurting performance. 

How does this affect Spark? 

1. Reading and writing data can be significantly slower than working with a normal filesystem.
1. Some directory structures may be very inefficient to scan during query split calculation.
1. The rename-based algorithm by which Spark normally commits work when saving an RDD, DataFrame or Dataset
 is potentially both slow and unreliable.

For these reasons, it is not always safe to use an object store as a direct destination of queries, or as
an intermediate store in a chain of queries. Consult the documentation of the object store and its
connector to determine which uses are considered safe.

### Consistency

As of 2021, the object stores of Amazon (S3), Google Cloud (GCS) and Microsoft (Azure Storage, ADLS Gen1, ADLS Gen2) are all *consistent*.

This means that as soon as a file is written/updated it can be listed, viewed and opened by other processes
-and the latest version will be retrieved. This was a known issue with AWS S3, especially with 404 caching
of HEAD requests made before an object was created.

Even so: none of the store connectors provide any guarantees as to how their clients cope with objects
which are overwritten while a stream is reading them. Do not assume that the old file can be safely
read, nor that there is any bounded time period for changes to become visible -or indeed, that
the clients will not simply fail if a file being read is overwritten.

For this reason: avoid overwriting files where it is known/likely that other clients
will be actively reading them.

Other object stores are *inconsistent*

This includes [OpenStack Swift](https://docs.openstack.org/swift/latest/).

Such stores are not always safe to use as a destination of work -consult
each store's specific documentation. 

### Installation

With the relevant libraries on the classpath and Spark configured with valid credentials,
objects can be read or written by using their URLs as the path to data.
For example `sparkContext.textFile("s3a://landsat-pds/scene_list.gz")` will create
an RDD of the file `scene_list.gz` stored in S3, using the s3a connector.

To add the relevant libraries to an application's classpath, include the `hadoop-cloud` 
module and its dependencies.

In Maven, add the following to the `pom.xml` file, assuming `spark.version`
is set to the chosen version of Spark:

{% highlight xml %}
<dependencyManagement>
  ...
  <dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.spark</groupId>
    <artifactId>spark-hadoop-cloud_{{site.SCALA_BINARY_VERSION}}</artifactId>
    <version>${spark.version}</version>
    <scope>provided</scope>
  </dependency>
  ...
</dependencyManagement>
{% endhighlight %}

Commercial products based on Apache Spark generally directly set up the classpath
for talking to cloud infrastructures, in which case this module may not be needed.

### Authenticating

Spark jobs must authenticate with the object stores to access data within them.

1. When Spark is running in a cloud infrastructure, the credentials are usually automatically set up.
1. `spark-submit` reads the `AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID`, `AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY`
and `AWS_SESSION_TOKEN` environment variables and sets the associated authentication options
for the `s3n` and `s3a` connectors to Amazon S3.
1. In a Hadoop cluster, settings may be set in the `core-site.xml` file.
1. Authentication details may be manually added to the Spark configuration in `spark-defaults.conf`
1. Alternatively, they can be programmatically set in the `SparkConf` instance used to configure 
the application's `SparkContext`.

*Important: never check authentication secrets into source code repositories,
especially public ones*

Consult [the Hadoop documentation](https://hadoop.apache.org/docs/current/) for the relevant
configuration and security options.

## Configuring

Each cloud connector has its own set of configuration parameters, again, 
consult the relevant documentation.

### Recommended settings for writing to object stores

For object stores whose consistency model means that rename-based commits are safe
use the `FileOutputCommitter` v2 algorithm for performance; v1 for safety.

```
spark.hadoop.mapreduce.fileoutputcommitter.algorithm.version 2
```

This does less renaming at the end of a job than the "version 1" algorithm.
As it still uses `rename()` to commit files, it is unsafe to use
when the object store does not have consistent metadata/listings.

The committer can also be set to ignore failures when cleaning up temporary
files; this reduces the risk that a transient network problem is escalated into a 
job failure:

```
spark.hadoop.mapreduce.fileoutputcommitter.cleanup-failures.ignored true
```

The original v1 commit algorithm renames the output of successful tasks
to a job attempt directory, and then renames all the files in that directory
into the final destination during the job commit phase:

```
spark.hadoop.mapreduce.fileoutputcommitter.algorithm.version 1
```

The slow performance of mimicked renames on Amazon S3 makes this algorithm
very, very slow. The recommended solution to this is switch to an S3 "Zero Rename"
committer (see below).

For reference, here are the performance and safety characteristics of
different stores and connectors when renaming directories:

| Store         | Connector | Directory Rename Safety | Rename Performance |
|---------------|-----------|-------------------------|--------------------|
| Amazon S3     | s3a       | Unsafe                  | O(data) |
| Azure Storage | wasb      | Safe                    | O(files) |
| Azure Datalake Gen 2 | abfs | Safe                  | O(1) |
| Google Cloud Storage | gs        | Mixed                    | O(files) |

1. As storing temporary files can run up charges; delete
directories called `"_temporary"` on a regular basis.
1. For AWS S3, set a limit on how long multipart uploads can remain outstanding.
This avoids incurring bills from incompleted uploads.
1. For Google cloud, directory rename is file-by-file. Consider using the v2 committer
and only write code which generates idempotent output -including filenames,
as it is *no more unsafe* than the v1 committer, and faster.

### Parquet I/O Settings

For optimal performance when working with Parquet data use the following settings:

```
spark.hadoop.parquet.enable.summary-metadata false
spark.sql.parquet.mergeSchema false
spark.sql.parquet.filterPushdown true
spark.sql.hive.metastorePartitionPruning true
```

These minimise the amount of data read during queries.

### ORC I/O Settings

For best performance when working with ORC data, use these settings:

```
spark.sql.orc.filterPushdown true
spark.sql.orc.splits.include.file.footer true
spark.sql.orc.cache.stripe.details.size 10000
spark.sql.hive.metastorePartitionPruning true
```

Again, these minimise the amount of data read during queries.

## Spark Streaming and Object Storage

Spark Streaming can monitor files added to object stores, by
creating a `FileInputDStream` to monitor a path in the store through a call to
`StreamingContext.textFileStream()`.

1. The time to scan for new files is proportional to the number of files
under the path, not the number of *new* files, so it can become a slow operation.
The size of the window needs to be set to handle this.

1. Files only appear in an object store once they are completely written; there
is no need for a workflow of write-then-rename to ensure that files aren't picked up
while they are still being written. Applications can write straight to the monitored directory.

1. In case of the default checkpoint file manager called `FileContextBasedCheckpointFileManager`
streams should only be checkpointed to a store implementing a fast and
atomic `rename()` operation. Otherwise the checkpointing may be slow and potentially unreliable.
On AWS S3 with Hadoop 3.3.1 or later using the S3A connector the abortable stream based checkpoint
file manager can be used (by setting the `spark.sql.streaming.checkpointFileManagerClass`
configuration to `org.apache.spark.internal.io.cloud.AbortableStreamBasedCheckpointFileManager`)
which eliminates the slow rename. In this case users must be extra careful to avoid the reuse of
the checkpoint location among multiple queries running parallelly as that could lead to corruption
of the checkpointing data.

## Committing work into cloud storage safely and fast.

As covered earlier, commit-by-rename is dangerous on any object store which
exhibits eventual consistency (example: S3), and often slower than classic
filesystem renames.

Some object store connectors provide custom committers to commit tasks and
jobs without using rename. In versions of Spark built with Hadoop 3.1 or later,
the S3A connector for AWS S3 is such a committer.

Instead of writing data to a temporary directory on the store for renaming,
these committers write the files to the final destination, but do not issue
the final POST command to make a large "multi-part" upload visible. Those
operations are postponed until the job commit itself. As a result, task and
job commit are much faster, and task failures do not affect the result. 

To switch to the S3A committers, use a version of Spark was built with Hadoop
3.1 or later, and switch the committers through the following options.

```
spark.hadoop.fs.s3a.committer.name directory
spark.sql.sources.commitProtocolClass org.apache.spark.internal.io.cloud.PathOutputCommitProtocol
spark.sql.parquet.output.committer.class org.apache.spark.internal.io.cloud.BindingParquetOutputCommitter
```

It has been tested with the most common formats supported by Spark.

```python
mydataframe.write.format("parquet").save("s3a://bucket/destination")
```

More details on these committers can be found in the latest Hadoop documentation.

Note: depending upon the committer used, in-progress statistics may be
under-reported with Hadoop versions before 3.3.1.

## Further Reading

Here is the documentation on the standard connectors both from Apache and the cloud providers.

* [OpenStack Swift](https://hadoop.apache.org/docs/current/hadoop-openstack/index.html).
* [Azure Blob Storage](https://hadoop.apache.org/docs/current/hadoop-azure/index.html).
* [Azure Blob Filesystem (ABFS) and Azure Datalake Gen 2](https://hadoop.apache.org/docs/current/hadoop-azure/abfs.html).
* [Azure Data Lake Gen 1](https://hadoop.apache.org/docs/current/hadoop-azure-datalake/index.html).
* [Amazon S3 Strong Consistency](https://aws.amazon.com/s3/consistency/)
* [Hadoop-AWS module (Hadoop 3.x)](https://hadoop.apache.org/docs/current3/hadoop-aws/tools/hadoop-aws/index.html).
* [Amazon S3 via S3A and S3N (Hadoop 2.x)](https://hadoop.apache.org/docs/current2/hadoop-aws/tools/hadoop-aws/index.html).
* [Amazon EMR File System (EMRFS)](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/emr/latest/ManagementGuide/emr-fs.html). From Amazon.
* [Using the EMRFS S3-optimized Committer](https://docs.amazonaws.cn/en_us/emr/latest/ReleaseGuide/emr-spark-s3-optimized-committer.html)
* [Google Cloud Storage Connector for Spark and Hadoop](https://cloud.google.com/dataproc/docs/concepts/connectors/cloud-storage). From Google.
* [The Azure Blob Filesystem driver (ABFS)](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/data-lake-storage-abfs-driver)
* IBM Cloud Object Storage connector for Apache Spark: [Stocator](https://github.com/CODAIT/stocator),
  [IBM Object Storage](https://www.ibm.com/cloud/object-storage). From IBM.
* [Using JindoFS SDK to access Alibaba Cloud OSS](https://github.com/aliyun/alibabacloud-jindofs).
