In cluster mode, the Spark driver runs inside an application master process which is managed by YARN on the cluster, and the client can go away after initiating the application. In client mode, the driver runs in the client process, and the application master is only used for requesting resources from YARN.

Sometimes we will have a bunch of logs for a terminated cluster and we need to find out which node was the driver in cluster mode.

Searching for “driverUrl” on the application/container logs, we will find it

find . -iname "*.gz" | xargs zgrep "driverUrl"
./container_1459071485818_0006_02_000001/stderr.gz:15/03/28 05:10:47 INFO YarnAllocator: Launching ExecutorRunnable. driverUrl: spark://CoarseGrainedScheduler@172.31.16.15:47452,  executorHostname: ip-172-31-16-13.ec2.internal
...
./container_1459071485818_0006_02_000001/stderr.gz:15/03/28 05:10:47 INFO YarnAllocator: Launching ExecutorRunnable. driverUrl: spark://CoarseGrainedScheduler@172.31.16.15:47452,  executorHostname: ip-172-31-16-14.ec2.internal

On this case the driver was running on 172.31.16.15.