Announcing Gluster release 4.0.0 (Short Term Maintenance)

[Shyam Ranganathan]

The Gluster community celebrates 13 years of development with this
latest release, Gluster 4.0. This release enables improved integration
with containers, an enhanced user experience, and a next-generation
management framework. The 4.0 release helps cloud-native app developers
choose Gluster as the default scale-out distributed file system.

We’re highlighting some of the announcements, major features and changes
here, but our release notes[1] have announcements, expanded major
changes and features, and bugs addressed in this release.

Major enhancements:

- Management
GlusterD2 (GD2) is a new management daemon for Gluster-4.0. It is a
complete rewrite, with all new internal core frameworks, that make it
more scalable, easier to integrate with and has lower maintenance
requirements. This replaces GlusterD.

A quick start guide [6] is available to get started with GD2.

Although GD2 is in tech preview for this release, it is ready to use for
forming and managing new clusters.

- Monitoring
With this release, GlusterFS enables a lightweight method to access
internal monitoring information.

- Performance
There are several enhancements to performance in the disperse translator
and in the client side metadata caching layers.

- Other enhancements of note
    This release adds: ability to run Gluster on FIPS compliant systems,
ability to force permissions while creating files/directories, and
improved consistency in distributed volumes.

- Developer related
New on-wire protocol version and full type encoding of internal
dictionaries on the wire, Global translator to handle per-daemon
options, improved translator initialization structure, among a few other
improvements, that help streamline development of newer translators.

Release packages (or where to get them) are available at [2] and are
signed with [3]. The upgrade guide for this release can be found at [4]

Related announcements:

- As 3.13 was a short term maintenance release, it will reach end of
life (EOL) with the release of 4.0.0 [5].

- Releases that receive maintenance updates post 4.0 release are, 3.10,
3.12, 4.0 [5].

- With this release, the CentOS storage SIG will not build server
packages for CentOS6. Server packages will be available for CentOS7
only. For ease of migrations, client packages on CentOS6 will be
published and maintained, as announced here [7].

References:
[1] Release notes:
https://docs.gluster.org/en/latest/release-notes/4.0.0.md/
[2] Packages: https://download.gluster.org/pub/gluster/glusterfs/4.0/
[3] Packages signed with:
https://download.gluster.org/pub/gluster/glusterfs/4.0/rsa.pub
[4] Upgrade guide:
https://docs.gluster.org/en/latest/Upgrade-Guide/upgrade_to_4.0/
[5] Release schedule: https://www.gluster.org/release-schedule/
[6] GD2 quick start:
https://github.com/gluster/glusterd2/blob/master/doc/quick-start-user-guide.md
[7] CentOS Storage SIG CentOS6 support announcement:
http://lists.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2018-January/033212.html