HDFS in Practice

HDFS in Practice

So far, we covered the theory behind HDFS, its different components and a higher level of understanding on its working. Now we delve into a hands-on exercise interacting with HDFS in a pseudo-distributed cluster running in a docker container. The path environment variable has been set correctly so that the hdfs executable is available. The hdfs command line utility exposes three kinds of commands:

• Admin commands
• Client commands
• Daemon commands

Client commands are the most commonly used. Admin and daemon commands are usually used by Hadoop administrators. Our overview of the commands isn’t a comprehensive study of all the commands and features exposed by the hdfs utility. Rather, it gives the user enough familiarity to find their way for performing various, necessary tasks. Let’s start!