WebHDFS is REST-API to HDFS. To facilitate access to WebHDFS from Python, webhdfs-py was developed. The library can easily be installed via easy_install or pip:

easy_install webhdfs

Webhdfs-py has no further dependencies and solely relies on the Python standard library. Similar to the Python os package, webhdfs-py provides basic capabilities like the creation/listing and deletion of directories on files.