SparklyR on Azure with AZTK

How to use SparklyR on Azure with AZTK

This document is a guide for how to create an Apache Spark cluster for an R user. In this tutorial, we install and setup Rstudio Server.

This guide does not require any knowledge about Azure or cloud infrastructure.

The goal for this tutorial is to:

Provision a Spark cluster to use R with
To interact with said Spark cluster with a RStudio Server
To achieve the above goals quickly, cheaply, and easily

For this tutorial, we assume that you have the following requirements:

Setup AZTK

In your working directory, run aztk spark init to initialize AZTK. This command will create a .aztk/ folder in your working directory. Fill out the .aztk/secrets.yaml file with your Azure Batch and Azure Storage account secrets. We also recommend setting your ssh-key here.

For more details, see this section

For this tutorial, please copy the folder aztk/custom-scripts into your working directory. This should be located in AZTK repo that you cloned when installing AZTK. (If you are working directly in the cloned repo, you can skip this step as the /custom-scripts folder is already there.)

Provision your cluster

Set up your Spark cluster with the aztk/r-base Docker image and a custom script

To provision your Spark cluster for R users, you will need to edit .aztk/cluster.yaml. You need to set the parameters docker_repo and custom_scripts as follows:

# .aztk/cluster.yaml

...
docker_repo: aztk/r-base:latest
custom_scripts:
  - script: custom-scripts/rstudio_server.sh
    runOn: master
...

This will tell AZTK to use the aztk/r-base image to build your cluster as well as configure Rstudio Server to run seamlessly after the cluster is set up. This requires custom-scripts/rstudio_server.sh to be a valid path from your working directory

Feel free to modify the other parameters as needed.

Create cluster through command-line (recommended)

You can now run the aztk cluster create command:

aztk spark cluster create --id <my_spark_cluster> --size 10

This command will automatically use the contents that we modified in .aztk/cluster.yaml (and .aztk/spark-defaults.conf).

Interact with Sparklyr

After you've run your aztk spark cluster create command, you will need to wait a few minutes for your cluster to be ready.

Once it is ready, you can use the following command to ssh into your cluster's master node. This command will also port forward the necessary ports to start using RStudio Server and the standard Spark UIs:

aztk spark cluster ssh --id <my_spark_cluster>

Once you've ssh'ed in, you'll be in the master node of your cluster. You can open up your favorite browser and go to localhost:8787 to use RStudio Server. We have created a default user 'rstudio' with 'rstudio' as the password.

Connecting to your cluster

library(sparklyr)

# Getting ip address of the master node
cluster_url <- paste0("spark://", system("hostname -i", intern = TRUE), ":7077")

sc <- spark_connect(master = cluster_url)