The Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is the primary data storage system used by Hadoop applications. It employs a NameNode and DataNode architecture to implement a distributed file system that provides high-performance access to data across highly scalable Hadoop clusters.

HDFS is a key part of the many Hadoop ecosystem technologies, as it provides a reliable means for managing pools of big data and supporting related big data analytics applications.

How HDFS works

HDFS supports the rapid transfer of data between compute nodes. At its outset, it was closely coupled with MapReduce, a programmatic framework for data processing.