Cloudera Community Edition on AWS in One Command

8 minute read

Updated: August 03, 2026

Cloudera has a lot of ways to get a cluster. Almost none of them are “one command on your laptop.” cloudera-labs/cloudera-ce-aws is the exception: a Terraform + Ansible bundle that stands up a full Cloudera Private Cloud Community Edition cluster on AWS — Cloudera Manager, Kerberos, Auto-TLS, a real storage/compute topology — from a single ansible-navigator run. This post is me taking my freshly-released fork from zero to a running Ozone cluster, and the handful of real snags between the README and a green Cloudera Manager.

Everything here is field-run against cloudera-ce-aws v1.0.0, deploying Cloudera Manager 7.13.2 / Runtime 7.3.2, from an Apple-Silicon Mac into AWS account AWS SE in us-east-2.

What it actually deploys

A ring-fenced cluster — ~11 EC2 nodes — with everything a real Cloudera deployment has and a laptop demo usually fakes:

Cloudera Manager with Kerberos and Auto-TLS
Self-contained DNS, Kerberos (FreeIPA), PostgreSQL, and TLS (ACME-managed certs on a Caddy reverse proxy)
A selectable topology — Ozone, Kafka, Flink, NiFi, CSA, or ECS — each its own playbook
Reverse HTTPS proxies + SSH as the only ways in; the cluster is otherwise sealed

The whole thing is idempotent: re-running produces no unintended changes. The node roles and default sizing (t3a for most, one r5a.xlarge for CMS):

Role	Count	Instance
gateway	1	t3a.medium
services	1	t3a.large
masters	3	t3a.xlarge
workers	4	t3a.xlarge
cms	1	r5a.xlarge
sdx	1	t3a.xlarge

At on-demand rates that’s roughly ~$2/hr / ~$45/day — worth a pause.yml between sessions (stops EC2, keeps EBS) if you’re leaving it up.

AWS EC2 console — the ~11 EC2 instances the deployment provisions, one per cluster role (gateway, services, masters, workers, cms, sdx)

The setup is genuinely minimal

Every dependency — Terraform, Ansible, all the collections — is baked into an Ansible execution-environment container image. Locally you need almost nothing:

git clone https://github.com/cloudera-labs/cloudera-ce-aws.git
cd cloudera-ce-aws
python -m venv ~/cdp-navigator && source ~/cdp-navigator/bin/activate
pip install ansible-core ansible-navigator

Plus a container runtime (Docker or Podman) and two credentials: AWS SSO and a Cloudera license .txt.

# AWS SSO — the config uses your SSO profile to mint short-lived creds
aws sso login --profile YOUR_PROFILE

# Cloudera Private Cloud license — the text file, NOT the .zip
export CDP_LICENSE_FILE=/path/to/license.txt

Then a three-line config.yml:

name_prefix: "steven-ce"
infra_region: "us-east-2"
common_password: "<min 8 chars, 1 number>"
owner_email: "you@cloudera.com"

And the one command that does everything:

ansible-navigator run playbooks/infrastructure.yml playbooks/services.yml \
  playbooks/cms.yml playbooks/ozone-cluster.yml -e @config.yml -m stdout

Four playbooks, four stages: Terraform provisions the AWS infra → Ansible configures DNS/Kerberos/DB/TLS → Cloudera Manager comes up → the Ozone cluster deploys.

The snags between README and a running cluster

The quickstart is clean, but seven things cost me time — exactly the stuff a reveal post should call out. The first four are one-time setup friction; the last three are genuine traps in the v1.0.0 release.

1. The `:latest` EE image tag isn’t published

ansible-navigator.yml points the execution environment at ghcr.io/cloudera-labs/cloudera-ce-aws:latest. That tag doesn’t exist — the registry only publishes 1.0.0-amd64:

Error response from daemon: failed to resolve reference
"ghcr.io/cloudera-labs/cloudera-ce-aws:latest": not found

Fix — pin the real tag in ansible-navigator.yml:

    image: ghcr.io/cloudera-labs/cloudera-ce-aws:1.0.0-amd64

2. The EE image is amd64-only — on Apple Silicon it runs emulated

The only published arch is -amd64. On an M-series Mac the image runs under emulation; make it explicit so Docker doesn’t guess:

    container-options:
      - "--network=host"
      - "--platform=linux/amd64"

The EE is an orchestration controller — it drives Terraform and SSHes to the nodes; it isn’t doing heavy local compute — so emulation is a non-issue for throughput here.

3. “Logged into AWS” (console) ≠ AWS CLI has credentials

I was logged into the AWS access portal in the browser, but the CLI had no profile, no cached token, nothing — NoCredentials. The fix is aws configure sso, but the trap is subtler: after setup my default profile carried the sso_session but was missing sso_account_id and sso_role_name, so it still couldn’t resolve credentials. A complete profile:

[sso-session Cloudera-Main-SSO]
sso_start_url = https://d-xxxxxxxxxx.awsapps.com/start#/
sso_region = us-east-1
sso_registration_scopes = sso:account:access

[profile cldr-se]
sso_session = Cloudera-Main-SSO
sso_account_id = 007856030109
sso_role_name = cldr_poweruser
region = us-east-2

aws sts get-caller-identity --profile cldr-se should return your assumed-role ARN. That token is cached on disk, so it survives across shells — which matters because the deploy consumes the creds via aws configure export-credentials.

4. `common_password` and `config.yml` are secrets in a public repo

config.yml holds a plaintext password and your fork is public. It’s in .gitignore (alongside *.pem and *.tfstate) — confirm that before you commit anything, because a leaked common_password there unlocks every service in the cluster.

5. Keep `common_password` alphanumeric — special characters break service enrollment

Hint — this one cost me a full teardown. Make common_password letters and digits only. Cloudera’s automation sets service admin passwords through basic-auth API calls shaped like https://admin:PASSWORD@host/..., so an @ or # inside the password corrupts the URL’s userinfo section and enrollment fails — and the task is no_log, so the error is censored and you can’t see why. Alphanumeric still satisfies the “min 8 chars, 1 number” rule; you lose nothing.

My first run had common_password full of special characters (#, @). The deploy sailed through Terraform and most of the services stage, then died on:

TASK [cloudera.exe.grafana : Set Grafana admin password if API login fails]
fatal: [<services-node>]: FAILED! => {"censored": "... 'no_log: true' ..."}

The result is censored (no_log), but the cause is the password: common_password feeds service admin passwords that get set via basic-auth API calls (https://admin:PASSWORD@host/...). An @ inside the password breaks URL userinfo parsing, so the API login/set fails. The same password later feeds CM, Ranger, Knox, Hue, and SMM — so this isn’t a Grafana quirk, it’s a landmine for every API-set credential downstream.

Fix: keep common_password alphanumeric (letters + digits, meets the “min 8, 1 number” rule without @ # $ / :). Because the password is baked into FreeIPA/DB/services as they’re provisioned, the clean fix is a teardown + redeploy with the safe password, not an in-place change.

6. `enable_prometheus` is declared twice — Grafana runs even when you think it’s off

config-template.yml implies Prometheus/Grafana is off by default (# enable_prometheus: false). But group_vars/all.yml defines the key twice — false, then true further down — and last-wins in YAML, so the effective default is true. That’s why the Grafana tasks ran (and hit gotcha #5) even though I never enabled them. If you don’t want the monitoring stack, set enable_prometheus: false explicitly in your config.yml so it overrides the duplicate.

7. `tee`-ing an `ansible-navigator` run hides the real exit code

The EE launches with --tty, so piping the run through tee sends output to the container’s PTY (the pipe stays empty) and reports the pipeline’s exit code (tee’s 0) rather than ansible’s. A run that actually failed looked like it succeeded. Watch the run with docker logs -f <ansible_runner_container> instead, and trust the PLAY RECAP failed= counts, not the shell exit code.

The deploy, stage by stage

One ansible-navigator run chains four playbooks. On my run — Apple-Silicon Mac, amd64 EE under emulation, default instance sizes — the full stand-up took about 2.5 hours end to end. The long poles are parcel distribution and bringing 14 Kerberized services up, not the Terraform infra (which was ~10 min); native amd64 and larger nodes would cut this down.

Stage	Playbook	What happens
1	`infrastructure.yml`	Terraform: VPC, security groups, 11 EC2 nodes, generated SSH key
2	`services.yml`	FreeIPA (DNS + Kerberos), PostgreSQL, Caddy/TLS, Node Exporter, Prometheus/Grafana
3	`cms.yml`	Cloudera Manager install + license, CM agents, AutoTLS, CM Kerberos
4	`ozone-cluster.yml`	CM builds the cluster: distribute/activate parcels, assign roles, start services

Every stage ended failed=0. The final recap across all 11 hosts:

PLAY RECAP
steven-ce-base-master-01.cldr.internal : ok=197 changed=75  unreachable=0 failed=0
steven-ce-base-master-02.cldr.internal : ok=197 changed=75  unreachable=0 failed=0
steven-ce-base-master-03.cldr.internal : ok=197 changed=75  unreachable=0 failed=0
steven-ce-base-worker-01.cldr.internal : ok=197 changed=75  unreachable=0 failed=0
   ... workers 02–04 identical ...
steven-ce-gateway-01.cldr.internal     : ok=93  changed=55  unreachable=0 failed=0
steven-ce-manager-01.cldr.internal     : ok=182 changed=79  unreachable=0 failed=0
steven-ce-sdx-01.cldr.internal         : ok=196 changed=75  unreachable=0 failed=0
steven-ce-services-01.cldr.internal    : ok=205 changed=121 unreachable=0 failed=0

One thing worth knowing: right after the Ozone stage completes, the CM cluster can briefly show BAD_HEALTH while ZooKeeper’s startup canary settles — it flips to GOOD on its own within a couple minutes. Don’t panic-restart it.

Cloudera Manager → All Hosts — every node in the cluster reporting Good Health and Commissioned

What you get at the end

A GOOD_HEALTH ozone-base-cluster on Cloudera Runtime 7.3.2, reachable through the Caddy reverse proxy on the single public node (the gateway) via a nip.io hostname:

Cloudera Manager: https://cm.<gateway-public-ip>.nip.io — admin / your common_password
Cluster health (straight from the CM API): cluster GOOD_HEALTH; all 14 services GOOD — HDFS, Ozone, Kafka, YARN, Hive, Hive-on-Tez, HBase, Ranger, Knox, Atlas, Solr, ZooKeeper, Tez, Core Settings.
Only the gateway node has a public IP; every other node is private and reached through the proxy — the ring-fenced design the README promises.

Cloudera Manager home — ozone-base-cluster healthy on Cloudera Runtime 7.3.2 (Parcels), 8 hosts, every service green, with live cluster CPU / disk / network / HDFS charts

Cost control — pause, resume, tear down

The cluster bills ~$2/hr while it runs, so know the exits up front. All three are the same one-command shape:

# Pause — stop the EC2 instances, keep the EBS volumes + cluster state (cheapest way to keep it around)
ansible-navigator run playbooks/pause.yml -e @config.yml -m stdout

# Resume — start the instances back up
ansible-navigator run playbooks/resume.yml -e @config.yml -m stdout

# Tear down — Terraform destroys everything: instances, volumes, VPC
ansible-navigator run playbooks/infrastructure-teardown.yml -e @config.yml -m stdout

Teardown is a terraform destroy under the hood and finishes in a few minutes with a clean recap:

PLAY RECAP
localhost : ok=3 changed=1 unreachable=0 failed=0

Then confirm nothing is left billing before you walk away — Terraform state should be empty and AWS should report zero instances:

aws ec2 describe-instances --profile <your-profile> --region us-east-2 \
  --filters "Name=tag:deployment,Values=<name_prefix>" \
            "Name=instance-state-name,Values=running,pending,stopping,stopped" \
  --query 'length(Reservations[].Instances[])' --output text
# -> 0

What NOT to do

Don’t trust the :latest EE tag — pin 1.0.0-amd64.
Don’t assume console login = CLI creds — configure an SSO profile with account and role.
Don’t commit config.yml — it holds a plaintext password; keep it gitignored.
Don’t use the license .zip — CDP_LICENSE_FILE wants the .txt.
Don’t leave it running unwatched — pause.yml or infrastructure-teardown.yml when you’re done.