After a cluster is delivered for operation, maintenance will be a necessary ongoing task while the cluster is in use. Typical maintenance tasks include finding out and correcting faults, changing cluster size, making configuration changes, and so on.
One of the most important HBase features is that it is extremely easy to scale in and out. As your service and data keeps growing, you might need to add nodes to the cluster.
Graceful node decommissioning and rolling restart will also become necessary. Minimizing the offline time during the decommission and restart is an important task. What is important is to keep the data distribution the same as what it was before the restart, to retain data locality.
Another maintenance task is to manage HBase deployment. There are many ways to deploy your HBase to the cluster. The simplest way is to use a script-based approach to sync HBase installations and configurations across the cluster.
We will cover these topics in the first six recipes...
