The problem with HDFS and streaming data/logs

HDFS isn't a real filesystem, at least not in the traditional sense, and many of the things we take for granted with normal filesystems don't apply here, for example being able to mount it. This makes getting your streaming data into Hadoop a little more complicated.

In a regular Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) style filesystem, if you open a file and write data, it still exists on disk before the file is closed. That is, if another program opens the same file and starts reading, it will get the data already flushed by the writer to disk. Furthermore, if that writing process is interrupted, any portion that made it to disk is usable (it may be incomplete, but it exists).

In HDFS the file ...

Get Apache Flume: Distributed Log Collection for Hadoop now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.