If you are running on a node with hdfs gateway or in one of our training VMs, or in other situations where the host that provides access to HDFS is 'localhost', then you use three forward slashes, as in 'hdfs:///user/'.  Its a common mistake to miss the third slash. ... View more

In case it helps anyone else ....   I encountered this problem because I didn't specify any HDFS Data Nodes in my configuration.  I had specified services that depended on HDFS in the cluster in a 'master' template and had one instance of master, but my worker nodes had the HDFS: [DATANODE] role commented out. It makes sense that the cluster couldn't start.  ... View more

I experienced this issue when setting the parameter   associatePublicIpAddresses: false   The default seems to be 'true'. The notes for this parameter say ...   # Whether to associate a public IP address with instances or not. If this is false # we expect instances to be able to access the internet using a NAT instance # # Currently the only way to get optimal S3 data transfer performance is to assign # public IP addresses to your instances and not use NAT (public subnet type of setup) # # See: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/vpc-ip-addressing.html   So it makes sense that if you attempt to set this parameter to false that you may need to configure NAT as mentioned above. ... View more