Q13Cloud Computing
Question
4 marks
Explain the architecture of HDFS.
Answer
HDFS follows a master-slave architecture with a single NameNode and multiple DataNodes.
The Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is designed to store very large files across machines in a large cluster. The NameNode acts as the master, managing the file system namespace, maintaining the metadata (like directory structure and file-to-block mapping), and regulating access. The DataNodes act as slaves, storing and retrieving the actual data blocks, which are replicated across multiple nodes (typically 3) for fault tolerance. They report block health and status to the NameNode periodically.