Hi, team. As you know, a large part of the startup time in a cloud is spent spinning up "blank" machines, then installing the base software. I've noticed that we start the hadoop master and configure it, then the slaves. I'm pretty sure we can eliminate a few minutes from this by starting the masters and slaves up simultaneously, then configuring them after the software is on. Initially, this can be done via runScriptOnNodes... later, this could be deferred to another system like chef.
What do you think? -Adrian
