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

Great! I've also missed that in your initial post. This sounds like something we can warn  about during configuration file parsing. I will file an internal feature request to improve it.    Do placement groups improve things from a network latency perspective for you as expected?  ... View more