I'm able to run Spark on AWS EMR without much trouble following the documentation but from what I see it always uses YARN instead of the standalone manager. Is there any way to use the standalone mode instead of YARN easily? I don't really feel like hacking the bootstrap scripts to turn off yarn and deploy spark master/workers myself.
I'm running into a weird YARN related bug and I was hoping it won't happen with standalone manager.
As far as I know there are no way to run in standalone mode on EMR unless you go back to the old ami-versions instead of using the emr-release-label. The old ami-version will however cause other problems with newer versions of Spark, so I wouldn't go that way.
What you can do is to launch ordinary EC2-instances with Spark instead of using EMR. If you have a local Spark installation, go to the ec2 folder and use spark-ec2 to launch the cluster, like this:
./spark-ec2 --copy-aws-credentials --key-pair=MY_KEY --identity-file=MY_PEM_FILE.pem --region=MY_PREFERED_REGION --instance-type=INSTANCE_TYPE --slaves=NUMBER_OF_SLAVES --hadoop-major-version=2 --ganglia launch NAME_OF_JOB
I suspect that you have jar-files that are needed, so they have to be copied onto the cluster (copy to master first, ssh to master and copy them onto the slaves from there. ./spark-ec2/copy-dir on master will copy a directory onto all slaves). Then restart Spark:
./spark/sbin/stop-master.sh
./spark/sbin/stop-slaves.sh
./spark/sbin/start-master.sh
./spark/sbin/start-slaves.sh
and you are ready to launch Spark in standalone mode:
./spark/bin/spark-submit --deploy-mode client ...