In this chapter, we covered the HDFS sink in depth, which writes streaming data into HDFS. We covered how Flume can separate data into different HDFS paths based on time or contents of Flume headers. Several file-rolling techniques were also discussed, including time rotation, event count rotation, size rotation, and rotation on idle only.

Compression was discussed as a means to reduce storage requirements in HDFS, and should be used when possible. Besides storage savings, it is often faster to read a compressed file and decompress in memory than it is to read an uncompressed file. This will result in performance improvements in MapReduce jobs run on this data. The splitability of compressed data was also covered as a factor to decide when and which compression algorithm to use.

Event Serializers were introduced as the mechanism by which Flume events are converted into an external storage format, including text (body only), text and headers (headers and body), and Avro serialization...