FUSE

Our images of Apache Hadoop do contain the necessary binaries and libraries to use the HDFS FUSE driver.

FUSE is short for Filesystem in Userspace and allows a user to export a filesystem into the Linux kernel, which can then be mounted. HDFS contains a native FUSE driver/application, which means that an existing HDFS filesystem can be mounted into a Linux environment.

To use the FUSE driver you can either copy the required files out of the image and run it on a host outside of Kubernetes or you can run it in a Pod. This pod, however, will need some extra capabilities.

This is an example pod that will work as long as the host system that is running the kubelet does support FUSE:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: hdfs-fuse
spec:
  containers:
    - name: hdfs-fuse
      env:
        - name: HADOOP_CONF_DIR
          value: /stackable/conf/hdfs
      image: docker.stackable.tech/stackable/hadoop:<version> (1)
      imagePullPolicy: Always
      securityContext:
        privileged: true
      command:
        - tail
        - -f
        - /dev/null
      volumeMounts:
        - mountPath: /stackable/conf/hdfs
          name: hdfs-config
  volumes:
    - name: hdfs-config
      configMap:
        name: <your hdfs here> (2)

1	Ideally use the same version your HDFS is using. FUSE is baked in to our images as of SDP 23.11.
2	This needs to be a reference to a discovery ConfigMap as written by our HDFS operator.

Privileged Pods

Instead of privileged it might work to only add the capability SYS_ADMIN, our tests showed that this sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t, depending on the environment.

Example

securityContext:
  capabilities:
    add:
      - SYS_ADMIN

Unfortunately, there is no way around some extra privileges. In Kubernetes the Pods usually share the Kernel with the host running the Kubelet, which means a Pod wanting to use FUSE will need access to the underlying Kernel modules.

Inside this Pod you can get a shell (e.g. using kubectl exec --stdin --tty hdfs-fuse — /bin/bash) to get access to a script called fuse_dfs_wrapper (it is in the PATH of our Hadoop images).

To see the available options, call the script without any parameters.

To mount HDFS call the script like this:

fuse_dfs_wrapper dfs://<your hdfs> <target> (1) (2)

# This will run in debug mode and stay in the foreground
fuse_dfs_wrapper -odebug dfs://<your hdfs> <target>

# Example:
mkdir simple-hdfs
fuse_dfs_wrapper dfs://simple-hdfs simple-hdfs
cd simple-hdfs
# Any operations in this directory will now happen in HDFS

1	Again, use the name of the HDFS service as above
2	`target` is the directory in which HDFS will be mounted, it must exist otherwise this command will fail