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Data & Analytics · Intermediate

Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS)

Hadoop's distributed file system, which splits files into large blocks replicated across DataNodes, with a NameNode tracking metadata.

Definition

HDFS replicates blocks (three copies by default) for fault tolerance and moves computation to the data. In the cloud, object storage such as S3 or GCS usually replaces HDFS so compute and storage can be decoupled.

Exam tip

Moving from HDFS to Cloud Storage decouples storage from compute, letting clusters be ephemeral.

Related terms