[HADOOP-10809] hadoop-azure: page blob support

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 2.7.0
• Component/s: tools
• Target Version/s: 2.7.0
• Hadoop Flags: Reviewed
• Assignee: Eric N. Hanson
• Reporter: Mike Liddell
• Created: 09/Jul/14 22:44
• Updated: 10/Apr/15 20:04
• Resolved: 18/Dec/14 00:18

Description

Azure Blob Storage provides two flavors: block-blobs and page-blobs. Block-blobs are the general purpose kind that support convenient APIs and are the basis for the Azure Filesystem for Hadoop (see HADOOP-9629).

Page-blobs use the same namespace as block-blobs but provide a different low-level feature set. Most importantly, page-blobs can cope with an effectively infinite number of small accesses whereas block-blobs can only tolerate 50K appends before relatively manual rewriting of the data is necessary. A simple analogy is that page-blobs are like a regular disk and the basic API is like a low-level device driver.

See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/ee691964.aspx for some introductory material.

The primary driving scenario for page-blob support is for HBase transaction log files which require an access pattern of many small writes. Additional scenarios can also be supported.

Configuration:
The Hadoop Filesystem abstraction needs a mechanism so that file-create can determine whether to create a block- or page-blob. To permit scenarios where application code doesn't know about the details of azure storage we would like the configuration to be Aspect-style, ie configured by the Administrator and transparent to the application. The current solution is to use hadoop configuration to declare a list of page-blob folders – Azure Filesystem for Hadoop will create files in these folders using page-blob flavor. The configuration key is "fs.azure.page.blob.dir", and description can be found in AzureNativeFileSystemStore.java.

Code changes:

• refactor of basic Azure Filesystem code to use a general BlobWrapper and specialized BlockBlobWrapper vs PageBlobWrapper
• introduction of PageBlob support (read, write, etc)
• miscellaneous changes such as umask handling, implementation of createNonRecursive(), flush/hflush/hsync.
• new unit tests.

Credit for the primary patch: Dexter Bradshaw, Mostafa Elhemali, Eric Hanson, Mike Liddell.

Also included in the patch is support for atomic folder rename over the Azure blob store through the Azure file system layer for Hadoop. See the README file for more details, including how to use the fs.azure.atomic.rename.dir configuration variable to control where atomic folder rename logic is applied. By default, folders under /hbase have atomic rename applied, which is needed for correct operation of HBase.

Issue Links

• is duplicated by: HADOOP-10206 Port WASB HBase support to Hadoop 2.0
• relates to: HADOOP-9629 Support Windows Azure Storage - Blob as a file system in Hadoop