To run Cloudera Desktop on Amazon EC2 is simply a customization of Cloudera's existing scripts to start Hadoop clusters on EC2. Before proceeding, familiarize yourself with the documentation for Cloudera Distrubtion AMI for Hadoop.
When working through the Getting Started section, you established an ec2-clusters.cfg file. To use Cloudera Desktop, you need to download a custom user_data_file script. First, download it.
# wget http://archive.cloudera.com/desktop/hadoop-and-desktop-ec2-init-remote-0.2.0.sh
Then, update the ec2-clusters.cfg file to reference it. For example,
[my-hadoop-cluster] ami=ami-6159bf08 instance_type=c1.medium key_name=tom availability_zone=us-east-1c private_key=PATH_TO_PRIVATE_KEY ssh_options=-i %(private_key)s -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no # Insert the following line! user_data_file=/path/to/hadoop-and-desktop-ec2-init-remote-0.2.0.sh
To start the cluster with 3 slave nodes, use hadoop-ec2 launch-cluster [my-hadoop-cluster] 3. You'll then want to access the Cloudera Desktop web page at port 8088. You can either use an SSH proxy, as described at "Launching Cluster", or you'll want to open up port 8088 in the [my-hadoop-cluster-master] security group. Since you can launch jobs on the cluster through Cloudera Desktop, do note that you don't want to be overly permissive with your firewall rules.