Cloudera has a great toolkit to work with Hadoop.  Specifically it is focused on building distributed systems and services on top of the Hadoop Ecosystem.

http://cloudera.github.io/cdk/docs/0.2.0/cdk-data/guide.html

And the examples are in Scala!!!!

Here is how you you work with generic stuff on the file system including Avro files reading and writing.

https://github.com/cloudera/cdk/blob/master/cdk-examples/src/main/scala/creategeneric.scala

/**
* Copyright 2013 Cloudera Inc.
*
* Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
* you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
* You may obtain a copy of the License at
*
* http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
*
* Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
* distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
* WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
* See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
* limitations under the License.
*/
import com.cloudera.data.{DatasetDescriptor, DatasetWriter}
import com.cloudera.data.filesystem.FileSystemDatasetRepository
import java.io.FileInputStream
import org.apache.avro.Schema
import org.apache.avro.Schema.Parser
import org.apache.avro.generic.{GenericRecord, GenericRecordBuilder}
import org.apache.hadoop.conf.Configuration
import org.apache.hadoop.fs.{FileSystem, Path}
import scala.compat.Platform
import scala.util.Random

// Construct a local filesystem dataset repository rooted at /tmp/data
val repo = new FileSystemDatasetRepository(
FileSystem.get(new Configuration()),
new Path("/tmp/data")
)

// Read an Avro schema from the user.avsc file on the classpath
val schema = new Parser().parse(new FileInputStream("src/main/resources/user.avsc"))

// Create a dataset of users with the Avro schema in the repository
val descriptor = new DatasetDescriptor.Builder().schema(schema).get()
val users = repo.create("users", descriptor)

// Get a writer for the dataset and write some users to it
val writer = users.getWriter().asInstanceOf[DatasetWriter[GenericRecord]]
writer.open()
val colors = Array("green", "blue", "pink", "brown", "yellow")
val rand = new Random()
for (i val builder = new GenericRecordBuilder(schema)
val record = builder.set("username", "user-" + i)
.set("creationDate", Platform.currentTime)
.set("favoriteColor", colors(rand.nextInt(colors.length))).build()
writer.write(record)
}
writer.close()

Big ups to the Cloudera team!

/*
Joe Stein
https://twitter.com/allthingshadoop
*/