A Secure HDFS Client Example

It takes about 3 lines of Java code to write a simple HDFS client that can further be used to upload, read or list files. Here is an example:

Configuration conf = new Configuration();
FileSystem fs = FileSystem.get(conf);

This file system API gives the developer a generic interface to (any supported) file system depending on the protocol being use, in this case hdfs. This is enough to alter data on the Hadoop Distributed Filesystem, for example to list all the files under the root folder:

FileStatus[] fsStatus = fs.listStatus(new Path("/"));
for(int i = 0; i < fsStatus.length; i++){

For a secured environment this is not enough, because you would need to consider these further aspects:

  1. A secure protocol
  2. Authentication with Kerberos
  3. Impersonation (proxy user), if designed as a service

What we discuss here for a sample HDFS client can in variance also be applied to other Hadoop clients.

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