[throwaway9101]

Personal plug, because the article mentions snakebite; hadoofus[1] is a C library that natively speaks to HDFS (v1), with a Python wrapper. No Java involved.

Pros (vs Snakebite):

* C, not Python. More portable to non-Python languages; probably faster

* Speaks v1 of the protocol (AFAIK, nothing else does this except via JNI to hadoop's Java client)

* Kerberos authentication supported (but not datanode tokens or the digest auth they employ)

Cons:

* Sort of abandonware. I don't personally use HDFS anymore, so it has stagnated.

* As an extension of the above, doesn't support the v2 (Protobuf-based) protocol

* C, not Python. All the usual potential issues with C that Python shields you from.

[1]: https://github.com/cemeyer/hadoofus

[kyrre]

might as well use webhdfs these days