What is most efficient way to write from kafka to hdfs with files partitioning into dates

You should definitely check out Camus API implementation from linkedIn. Camus is LinkedIn’s Kafka->HDFS pipeline. It is a mapreduce job that does distributed data loads out of Kafka. Check out this post I have written for a simple example which fetches from twitter stream and writes to HDFS based on tweet timestamps.

Project is available at github at - https://github.com/linkedin/camus

Camus needs two main components for reading and decoding data from Kafka and writing data to HDFS –

Decoding Messages read from Kafka

Camus has a set of Decoders which helps in decoding messages coming from Kafka, Decoders basically extends com.linkedin.camus.coders.MessageDecoder which implements logic to partition data based on timestamp. A set of predefined Decoders are present in this directory and you can write your own based on these. camus/camus-kafka-coders/src/main/java/com/linkedin/camus/etl/kafka/coders/

Writing messages to HDFS

Camus needs a set of RecordWriterProvider classes which extends com.linkedin.camus.etl.RecordWriterProvider that will tell Camus what’s the payload that should be written to HDFS.A set of predefined RecordWriterProvider are present in this directory and you can write your own based on these.

camus-etl-kafka/src/main/java/com/linkedin/camus/etl/kafka/common

If you're looking for a more real-time approach you should check out StreamSets Data Collector. It's also an Apache licensed open source tool for ingest.

The HDFS destination is configurable to write to time based directories based on the template you specify. And it already includes a way to specify a field in your incoming messages to use to determine the time a message should be written. The config is called "Time Basis" and you can specify something like ${record:value("/ts")}.

*full disclosure I'm an engineer working on this tool.

if you are using Apache Kafka 0.9 or above, you can use the Kafka Connect API.

check out https://github.com/confluentinc/kafka-connect-hdfs

This is a Kafka connector for copying data between Kafka and HDFS.