Writing and Deleting Files
Discover the processes behind writing and deleting files in distributed file systems. Learn how the client library interacts with manager nodes and chunk servers, supports concurrent writes using chain replication, and manages file deletions with locking and garbage collection. Understand the potential issues with partial failures during writes and the consistency mechanisms in place.
The clients can write and delete files from the distributed file system by using a GFS client library linked into the application that abstracts some implementation details.
For example, the applications can operate based on byte offsets of files. The client library can translate these byte offsets to the associated chunk index and communicate with the manager to retrieve the chunk handle for the provided chunk index as well as the location of associated chunk servers. Finally, it contacts the appropriate chunk server (most likely the closest one) to retrieve the data.
Write operations
Following are some write operations that clients can perform in a GFS system:
Atomic and linearizable file namespace mutations
File namespace mutations are atomic and linearizable. This is achieved by ...