[Gluster-devel] Glusterd: A New Hope

[Jeff Darcy]

On 03/22/2013 06:08 PM, Stephan von Krawczynski wrote:
> Why is it you cannot accept that it should be a _filesystem_, and nothing else?
> It would have been a lot better to care about stability, keep it simple and
> feel fine. Concentrate on the strength (client based replication setups) and
> forget the rest.

"Just a filesystem" has historically been an obstacle to deployment of
distributed filesystems, and just doesn't cut it any more.  It's
important to have a coherent notion of which servers are up and which
protocol versions they can accept.  It's essential for configuration
changes to be coordinated and communicated across the cluster, if those
changes are to be non-disruptive, and that's part of glusterd's job.  It
also handles process management (both regular brick daemons and
maintenance-related tasks), quorum enforcement, and other functions.
The trend is for distributed systems to become more autonomous, not less so.

If you want to run things in a 2.x fashion, feel free.  Volfiles still
work, and will continue to do so, though you'll be giving up a lot of
functionality that way.  Nobody else is asking us to turn back the clock
and throw away functionality.  Whatever the problems might be with
glusterd's implementation, the solutions lie ahead of us.  What's behind
us should and will still that way.