Hello, I'm about to start tackling our upgrade path for 0.94 to 1.0+. We have 6 production hbase clusters, 2 hadoop clusters, and hundreds of APIs/daemons/crons/etc hitting all of these things. Many of these clients hit multiple clusters in the same process. Daunting to say the least.
We can't take full downtime on any of these, though we can take read-only. And ideally we could take read-only on each cluster in a staggered fashion. >From a client perspective, all of our code currently assumes an HTableInterface, which gives me some wiggle room I think. With that in mind, here's my current plan: - Shade CDH5 to something like org.apache.hadoop.cdh5.hbase. - Create a shim implementation of HTableInterface. This shim would delegate to either the old cdh4 APIs or the new shaded CDH5 classes, depending on the cluster being talked to. - Once the shim is in place across all clients, I will put each cluster into read-only (a client side config of ours), migrate data to a new CDH5 cluster, then bounce affected services so they look there instead. I will do this for each cluster in sequence. This provides a great rollback strategy, and with our existing in-house cluster cloning tools we can minimize the read-only window to a few minutes if all goes well. There are a couple gotchas I can think of with the shim, which I'm hoping some of you might have ideas/opinions on: 1) Since protobufs are used for communication, we will have to avoid shading those particular classes as they need to match the package/classnames on the server side. I think this should be fine, as these are net-new, not conflicting with CDH4 artifacts. Any additions/concerns here? 2) I'd really like to be able to tackle HBase separately (and before) from Hadoop. With that in mind, *on the client side only*, it'd be great if I could pull in our shaded CDH5 hbase, but with the CDH4 hadoop libraries. All interactions with our hbase clusters happen through the hbase RPC. Should this be fine? 3) If #2 is not possible, I'll need to further shade parts of hadoop. Any idea of the minimum parts of hadoop would need to be pulled in/shaded for CDH5 hbase to work on the client side? Thanks! I'll look forward to posting all lessons learned at the end of this upgrade path for the community, and appreciate any input you may have on the above before I get started. Bryan
