I am thinking of launching a hadoop cluster on amazon ec2 to download a few tens of thousands of files and later do some processing of them but before putting to much work to it I would like to know if anyone more experienced with hadoop than me thinks that it is possible? I have some doubts about being able to download files on hadoop slaves. 
If you think that this is possible, can I expect each slave running on amazon ec2 to have different ip address?
I would like to use python to do most of the job (e.g. urllib2 module for downloading) and as little java as possible.
Its possible to download data onto hadoop on ec2. Hadoop has a distributed File system (HDFS) which takes care of placing blocks of data onto the slaves, and also honors the replication factor specified in configurations.
The slaves in ec2 have different ip addresses.
Downloading many large files through Amazon EC2 Hadoop