Hey gang, I'd like to get people's thoughts on the following proposal. I think we should consider removing append from HDFS.
Where we are today.. append was added in the 0.17-19 releases (HADOOP-1700) and subsequently disabled (HADOOP-5224) due to quality issues. It and sync were re-designed, re-implemented, and shipped in 21.0 (HDFS-265). To my knowledge, there has been no real production use. Anecdotally people who worked on branch-20-append have told me they think the new trunk code is substantially less well-tested than the branch-20-append code (at least for sync, append was never well tested). It has certainly gotten way less pounding from HBase users. The design however, is much improved, and people think we can get hsync (and append) stabilized in trunk (mostly testing and bug fixing). Rationale follows.. Append does not seem to be an important requirement, hflush was. There has not been much demand for append, from users or downstream projects. Because Hadoop 1.x does not have a working append implementation (see HDFS-3120, the branch-20-append work was focused on sync not getting append working) which is not enabled by default and downstream projects will want to support Hadoop 1.x releases for years, most will not introduce dependencies on append anyway. This is not to say demand does not exist, just that if it does, it's been much smaller than security, sync, HA, backwards compatbile RPC, etc. This probably explains why, over 5 years after the original implementation started, we don't have a stable release with append. Append introduces non-trivial design and code complexity, which is not worth the cost if we don't have real users. Removing append means we have the property that HDFS blocks, when finalized, are immutable. This significantly simplifies the design and code, which significantly simplifies the implementation of other features like snapshots, HDFS-level caching, dedupe, etc. The vast majority of the HDFS-265 effort is still leveraged w/o append. The new data durability and read consistency behavior was the key part. GFS, which HDFS' design is based on, has append (and atomic record append) so obviously a workable design does not preclude append. However we also should not ape the GFS feature set simply because it exists. I've had conversations with people who worked on GFS that regret adding record append (see also http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1594206). In short, unless append is a real priority for our users I think we should focus our energy elsewhere. Thanks, Eli
