How to execute Spark programs with Dynamic Resource Allocation?

In Spark dynamic allocation spark.dynamicAllocation.enabled needs to be set to true because it's false by default.

This requires spark.shuffle.service.enabled to be set to true, as spark application is running on YARN. Check this link to start the shuffle service on each NodeManager in YARN.

The following configurations are also relevant:

spark.dynamicAllocation.minExecutors, 
spark.dynamicAllocation.maxExecutors, and 
spark.dynamicAllocation.initialExecutors

These options can be configured to Spark application in 3 ways

1. From Spark submit with --conf <prop_name>=<prop_value>

spark-submit --master yarn-cluster \
    --driver-cores 2 \
    --driver-memory 2G \
    --num-executors 10 \
    --executor-cores 5 \
    --executor-memory 2G \
    --conf spark.dynamicAllocation.minExecutors=5 \
    --conf spark.dynamicAllocation.maxExecutors=30 \
    --conf spark.dynamicAllocation.initialExecutors=10 \ # same as --num-executors 10
    --class com.spark.sql.jdbc.SparkDFtoOracle2 \
    Spark-hive-sql-Dataframe-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar

2. Inside Spark program with SparkConf

Set the properties in SparkConf then create SparkSession or SparkContext with it

val conf: SparkConf = new SparkConf()
conf.set("spark.dynamicAllocation.minExecutors", "5");
conf.set("spark.dynamicAllocation.maxExecutors", "30");
conf.set("spark.dynamicAllocation.initialExecutors", "10");
.....

3. spark-defaults.conf usually located in $SPARK_HOME/conf/

Place the same configurations in spark-defaults.conf to apply for all spark applications if no configuration is passed from command-line as well as code.

Spark - Dynamic Allocation Confs