Apache HDFS

HADOOP DISTRIBUTED FILE SYSTEM

HDFS is a distributed file system that is designed for storing large data files. HDFS is a Java-based file system that provides scalable and reliable data storage, and it was designed to span large clusters of commodity servers. HDFS has demonstrated production scalability of up to 200 PB of storage and a single cluster of 4500 servers, supporting close to a billion files and blocks. HDFS is a scalable, fault-tolerant, distributed storage system that works closely with a wide variety of concurrent data access applications, coordinated by YARN. HDFS will “just work” under a variety of physical and systemic circumstances. By distributing storage and computation across many servers, the combined storage resource can grow linearly with demand while remaining economical at every amount of storage.

An HDFS cluster is comprised of a NameNode, which manages the cluster metadata, and DataNodes that store the data. Files and directories are represented on the NameNode by inodes. Inodes record attributes like permissions, modification and access times, or namespace and disk space quotas.

The file content is split into large blocks (typically 128 megabytes), and each block of the file is independently replicated at multiple DataNodes. The blocks are stored on the local file system on the DataNodes.

The Namenode actively monitors the number of replicas of a block. When a replica of a block is lost due to a DataNode failure or disk failure, the NameNode creates another replica of the block. The NameNode maintains the namespace tree and the mapping of blocks to DataNodes, holding the entire namespace image in RAM.

The NameNode does not directly send requests to DataNodes. It sends instructions to the DataNodes by replying to heartbeats sent by those DataNodes. The instructions include commands to:

·         replicate blocks to other nodes,

·         remove local block replicas,

·         re-register and send an immediate block report, or

·         shut down the node.