If you're installing Hadoop on a local machine, it is recommended that your system should have at least 4-8 GB of RAM (memory) and sufficient free disk space of at least 50 GB. Ideally, 8 GB or more memory will suffice for most applications. Below this, the performance will be lower but not prevent the user from carrying out the exercises. Please note that these numbers are estimates that are applicable for the exercises outlined in this book. A production environment will naturally have much higher requirements, which will be discussed at a later stage.

Installing analytics software, especially platforms such as Hadoop, can be quite challenging in terms of technical complexity and it is highly common for users to encounter errors that would have to be painstakingly resolved. Users spend more time attempting to resolve errors and fixing installation issues than they ideally should. This sort of additional overhead can easily be alleviated by using virtual machines (VMs), or more recently, containers such as Docker. For simpler platforms such as R and Python, we'll be using open source versions that come preinstalled with various libraries.