If not configured properly networking could be a real pain in Hadoop. All nodes in an Hadoop cluster need to see each other and they requires DNS (with reverse) and NTP. You can choose to deploy your cluster inside "cluster" network and use a multi-homed edge node as a bridge between "cluster" and "public" network. But you need to understand how you would access your cluster data (e.g.: JDBC thru Hive, WebHDFS for HDFS files and so on...). An edge nodes doesn't grant you access to Ambari Web UI, Ambari API, etc.. so if you deploy such a config you need to open specific TCP/IP ports in order to grant users on the "public" network to access such a service (e.g. Ambari Views). On the edge node you can deploy all clients (HDFS, YARN, Oozie, Hive, etc...) and let users to access edge node using SSH. It really depends how you want to manage access to Hadoop services and which services you need to give access to your end users. You can use NFS gateway or Knox on the edge node but what are your needs? Please take a look at this links: Hadoop TCP/IP ports: http://docs.hortonworks.com/HDPDocuments/HDP2/HDP-... Hadoop IDC and firewalls: http://docs.hortonworks.com/HDPDocuments/HDP2/HDP-... NFS Gateway: http://docs.hortonworks.com/HDPDocuments/HDP2/HDP-... Knox: http://docs.hortonworks.com/HDPDocuments/HDP2/HDP-... ... View more