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_2.12</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 is the authentication parameters required by Keystone.

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

Property Name	Meaning	Required
`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.