Create Amazon EMR Clusters on AWS Outposts
A visual guide
If you have an Outpost and you’re looking to launch some AWS services into it (or maybe you’re just curious about how it works!), hopefully this post gives you a simple jumping off point.
Note: you can also find these EMR+Outpost steps listed in the “Creating an Amazon EMR Cluster on AWS Outposts” section (p. 70) of the Amazon EMR Management Guide.
But for those of us who like screenshots for reference, here’s a pictorial guide.
From the EMR Console, in the AWS Region that serves as “home region” for the Outpost, click Create cluster.
The cluster’s target location can be switched from in-region (default) to an Outpost by specifying the Outpost’s subnet during cluster creation. Select Go to advanced options to expose more networking options.
Select the desired EMR release (5.28.0 or later for Outpost compatibility), and the additional software packages you’d like installed in the instances.
On the Step 2: Hardware tab, in the Networking section, choose the Outpost’s Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). The VPC must already exist and it must have a subnet for the Outpost. The EC2 Subnet field should automatically populate with the Outpost’s subnet.
In the Cluster Nodes and Instances section, be sure to select Instance type and Instance count values that match the instances present within your Outpost.
Complete the cluster definition as normal. Make sure to select an EC2 key pair (default value is to proceed without a key pair). When everything is ready, click Create cluster.
From the EMR Console, select the new cluster and View details to get to its summary page.
You should see that the Master public DNS value ends in “compute.internal,” which denotes it’s running inside the Outpost.
To access the cluster, collect SSH login info by clicking Connect to the Master Node Using SSH.
From a terminal, log into the master node via that command. Note that the login user for this cluster is named “hadoop” as opposed to the usual “ec2-user” or “ubuntu” users for standard EC2 instances.
Your EMR cluster is ready for use like normal. Have fun!
For navigating Outposts, also see:
