What is distributed Cache in MapReduce?

The Distributed cache in the Hadoop MapReduce framework is used to cache the files that are needed by the applications.

It is used to cache read-only text files, archives, jar files, etc. The cached file in the MapReduce distributed cache is available on each data node where the map/reduce tasks are running. Distributed cache provides many benefits such as storing complex data, eliminating a single point of failure, and ensuring data consistency.