Accessing OpenStack Swift from Spark

Spark’s support for Hadoop InputFormat allows it to process data in OpenStack Swift using the same URI formats as in Hadoop. You can specify a path in Swift as input through a URI of the form swift://container.PROVIDER/path. You will also need to set your Swift security credentials, through core-site.xml or via SparkContext.hadoopConfiguration. The current Swift driver requires Swift to use the Keystone authentication method, or its Rackspace-specific predecessor.

Configuring Swift for Better Data Locality

Although not mandatory, it is recommended to configure the proxy server of Swift with list_endpoints to have better data locality. More information is available here.

Dependencies

The Spark application should include hadoop-openstack dependency, which can be done by including the hadoop-cloud module for the specific version of spark used. For example, for Maven support, add the following to the pom.xml file:

<dependencyManagement>
  ...
  <dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.spark</groupId>
    <artifactId>hadoop-cloud_2.11</artifactId>
    <version>${spark.version}</version>
  </dependency>
  ...
</dependencyManagement>

Configuration Parameters

Create core-site.xml and place it inside Spark’s conf directory. The main category of parameters that should be configured are the authentication parameters required by Keystone.

The following table contains a list of Keystone mandatory parameters. PROVIDER can be any (alphanumeric) name.

Property NameMeaningRequired
fs.swift.service.PROVIDER.auth.url Keystone Authentication URL Mandatory
fs.swift.service.PROVIDER.auth.endpoint.prefix Keystone endpoints prefix Optional
fs.swift.service.PROVIDER.tenant Tenant Mandatory
fs.swift.service.PROVIDER.username Username Mandatory
fs.swift.service.PROVIDER.password Password Mandatory
fs.swift.service.PROVIDER.http.port HTTP port Mandatory
fs.swift.service.PROVIDER.region Keystone region Mandatory
fs.swift.service.PROVIDER.public Indicates whether to use the public (off cloud) or private (in cloud; no transfer fees) endpoints Mandatory

For example, assume PROVIDER=SparkTest and Keystone contains user tester with password testing defined for tenant test. Then core-site.xml should include:

<configuration>
  <property>
    <name>fs.swift.service.SparkTest.auth.url</name>
    <value>http://127.0.0.1:5000/v2.0/tokens</value>
  </property>
  <property>
    <name>fs.swift.service.SparkTest.auth.endpoint.prefix</name>
    <value>endpoints</value>
  </property>
    <name>fs.swift.service.SparkTest.http.port</name>
    <value>8080</value>
  </property>
  <property>
    <name>fs.swift.service.SparkTest.region</name>
    <value>RegionOne</value>
  </property>
  <property>
    <name>fs.swift.service.SparkTest.public</name>
    <value>true</value>
  </property>
  <property>
    <name>fs.swift.service.SparkTest.tenant</name>
    <value>test</value>
  </property>
  <property>
    <name>fs.swift.service.SparkTest.username</name>
    <value>tester</value>
  </property>
  <property>
    <name>fs.swift.service.SparkTest.password</name>
    <value>testing</value>
  </property>
</configuration>

Notice that fs.swift.service.PROVIDER.tenant, fs.swift.service.PROVIDER.username, fs.swift.service.PROVIDER.password contains sensitive information and keeping them in core-site.xml is not always a good approach. We suggest to keep those parameters in core-site.xml for testing purposes when running Spark via spark-shell. For job submissions they should be provided via sparkContext.hadoopConfiguration.