Differences between DFSClient and FileSystem in HDFS

What is the difference between DFSClient Protocol and FileSystem class in Hadoop DFS (HDFS). Both of these classes are used for connecting a remote client to the namenode in HDFS. So, I wanted to know the a开发者_运维知识库dvantages of one over the other and which one is suitable for remote-client connection.

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FileSystem is an abstract class for file management. There are multiple implementations of the FileSystem class like FTPFileSystem. Using the FileSystem API, it's easy to swap between different file systems.

DFSClient is a specific client for HDFS and does a lot more than file management like getting the namenode, getting the missing blocks count etc.