Amazon EMR cluster error: Cannot replicate block, only managed to replicate to zero nodes. - Amazon EMR
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Amazon EMR cluster error: Cannot replicate block, only managed to replicate to zero nodes.

The error, "Cannot replicate block, only managed to replicate to zero nodes." typically occurs when a cluster does not have enough HDFS storage. This error occurs when you generate more data in your cluster than can be stored in HDFS. You see this error only while the cluster is running, because when the job ends it releases the HDFS space it was using.

The amount of HDFS space available to a cluster depends on the number and type of Amazon EC2 instances that are used as core nodes. Task nodes are not used for HDFS storage. All of the disk space on each Amazon EC2 instance, including attached EBS storage volumes, is available to HDFS. For more information about the amount of local storage for each EC2 instance type, see Instance types and families in the Amazon EC2 User Guide.

The other factor that can affect the amount of HDFS space available is the replication factor, which is the number of copies of each data block that are stored in HDFS for redundancy. The replication factor increases with the number of nodes in the cluster: there are 3 copies of each data block for a cluster with 10 or more nodes, 2 copies of each block for a cluster with 4 to 9 nodes, and 1 copy (no redundancy) for clusters with 3 or fewer nodes. The total HDFS space available is divided by the replication factor. In some cases, such as increasing the number of nodes from 9 to 10, the increase in replication factor can actually cause the amount of available HDFS space to decrease.

For example, a cluster with ten core nodes of type m1.large would have 2833 GB of space available to HDFS ((10 nodes X 850 GB per node)/replication factor of 3).

If your cluster exceeds the amount of space available to HDFS, you can add additional core nodes to your cluster or use data compression to create more HDFS space. If your cluster is one that can be stopped and restarted, you may consider using core nodes of a larger Amazon EC2 instance type. You might also consider adjusting the replication factor. Be aware, though, that decreasing the replication factor reduces the redundancy of HDFS data and your cluster's ability to recover from lost or corrupted HDFS blocks.