A distributed implementation of {@link org.apache.hadoop.fs.FileSystem}. This is loosely modelled after Google's GFS.

The most important difference is that unlike GFS, Hadoop DFS files have strictly one writer at any one time. Bytes are always appended to the end of the writer's stream. There is no notion of "record appends" or "mutations" that are then checked or reordered. Writers simply emit a byte stream. That byte stream is guaranteed to be stored in the order written.