You can run HBase in the cloud with Amazon’s Elastic MapReduce or Microsoft’s HDInsight, but for local development and testing you don’t need a full-on cluster backed by Hadoop storage, you want something leaner (and cheaper). HBase is pretty straightforward to install and run locally, using the native filesystem so you don’t need HDFS. You can run in standalone mode (where all the services run in the same Java VM), or in pseudo-distributed mode (where you have separate Java processes for Zookeeper ......