Snakebite: a pure Python HDFS client

This post introduces Snakebite, a pure Python HDFS client designed to overcome the slow interaction speeds of the native Hadoop HDFS client. Snakebite communicates with HDFS using Protocol Buffers, bypassing the need to start a JVM for each operation. This results in significantly faster operations, as demonstrated by a benchmark showing a 10x speed improvement for `ls /` commands. The Snakebite project includes a Python library, a command-line client, and a mini-cluster wrapper for integration testing. Currently, it supports NameNode-only operations, with plans to implement DataNode interactions in the future.