Why another user is required to run hadoop?

Question

I have a question regarding hadoop configuration why we need to create a user for running hadoop can we not run hadoop on a root user?

Answer 1

Yes, you can run it as root.

It is not a requirement to have a dedicated user for Hadoop but having one with lesser privileges than root is considered a good practice. It helps in separating Hadoop processes from other services running on the same machine.

Answer 2

This is not hadoop specific, it's a common good practice in IT to have specific users for running daemons ,for security reasons (for example in hadoop, if you run map reduce daemons as root, a malign user could launch a map reduce job which deletes not only hdfs data, but operating system data), for best control ,etc. Take a look at this: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/29159/why-is-it-recommended-to-create-a-group-and-user-for-some-applications