What you need for this book

As we discuss the various Hadoop-related software packages used in this book, we will describe the particular requirements for each chapter. However, you will generally need somewhere to run your Hadoop cluster.

In the simplest case, a single Linux-based machine will give you a platform to explore almost all the exercises in this book. We assume you have a recent distribution of Ubuntu, but as long as you have command-line Linux familiarity any modern distribution will suffice.

Some of the examples in later chapters really need multiple machines to see things working, so you will require access to at least four such hosts. Virtual machines are completely acceptable; they're not ideal for production but are fine for learning and exploration.

Since we also explore Amazon Web Services in this book, you can run all the examples on EC2 instances, and we will look at some other more Hadoop-specific uses of AWS throughout the book. AWS services are usable by anyone, but you will need a credit card to sign up!