New Data Transfer Protocol via HTTP/2

The current Data Transfer Protocol (DTP) implements a rich set of features that span across multiple layers, including:

• Connection pooling and authentication (session layer)
• Encryption (presentation layer)
• Data writing pipeline (application layer)

All these features are HDFS-specific and defined by implementation. As a result it requires non-trivial amount of work to implement HDFS clients and servers.

This jira explores to delegate the responsibilities of the session and presentation layers to the HTTP/2 protocol. Particularly, HTTP/2 handles connection multiplexing, QoS, authentication and encryption, reducing the scope of DTP to the application layer only. By leveraging the existing HTTP/2 library, it should simplify the implementation of both HDFS clients and servers.