What you need for this book
Because most people don't have a large number of spare machines sitting around, we use the Cloudera QuickStart virtual machine for most of the examples in this book. This is a single machine image with all the components of a full Hadoop cluster pre-installed. It can be run on any host machine supporting either the VMware or the VirtualBox virtualization technology.
We also explore Amazon Web Services and how some of the Hadoop technologies can be run on the AWS Elastic MapReduce service. The AWS services can be managed through a web browser or a Linux command-line interface.