Is it possible to append to HDFS file from multiple clients in parallel?

Question

Basically whole question is in the title. I'm wondering if it's possible to append to file located on HDFS from multiple computers simultaneously? Something like storing stream of events constantly produced by multiple processes. Order is not important.

I recall hearing on one of the Google tech presentations that GFS supports such append functionality but trying some limited testing with HDFS (either with regular file append() or with SequenceFile) doesn't seems to work.

Thanks,

Answer 1

I don't think that this is possible with HDFS. Even though you don't care about the order of the records, you do care about the order of the bytes in the file. You don't want writer A to write a partial record that then gets corrupted by writer B. This is a hard problem for HDFS to solve on its own, so it doesn't.

Create a file per writer. Pass all the files to any MapReduce worker that needs to read this data. This is much simpler and fits the design of HDFS and Hadoop. If non-MapReduce code needs to read this data as one stream then either stream each file sequentially or write a very quick MapReduce job to consolidate the files.