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HDFS Erasure Coding

Ayush Tiwari explains how HDFS Erasure Coding lets us keep the same data durability while improving storage efficiency:

In this particular example, when you look at the codeword, actual data cells are 6(blue cells) & 3(red cells) are the parity cells which are simply obtained by multiplied our data cells to generation matrix.
Storage failure can be recovered by the multiplying inverse of generator matrix with the extended codewords as long as ‘k’ out of ‘k+m’ cells are available.
Therefore, here Data Durability is 3 as it can handle 2 simultaneous failure, Storage Efficiency is 67% (as we are using only 1 extra block i.e. 6/9) & only we need to store half number of cells as compared to original number of cells, we can conclude that we also have only 50% overhead in it.

It’s a good explanation of one of the biggest improvements to HDFS over the past several years.