Docker on YARN is relatively easy to set up on an existing cluster, but full clusters are not always available.
My Ember Project was created to simplify dev/test for technologies managed by Ambari and Cloudera Manager. It provides utilities for creating dockerized clusters that use far fewer resources than a full bare metal or VM-based cluster. Additionally, by using pre-built images, the time it takes to get a cluster up and running can be reduced to less than 10 minutes.
The following four commands are all that is necessary to download and run a ~5GB image that comes preinstalled with Ambari, Zookeeper, HDFS, and YARN with Docker on YARN pre-configured. Docker containers spawned by YARN will be created on the host machine as peers to the container with YARN inside. All containers are launched into the "ember" docker network by default. Once the container is downloaded, it takes less than 5 minutes to start all services.