[Gluster-devel] Glusterd: A New Hope

[Justin Clift]

On 22/03/2013, at 2:09 PM, Jeff Darcy wrote:
<snip>
> The best known example of such a coordination service
> is Apache's ZooKeeper[1], but there are others that don't have the
> noxious Java dependency - e.g. doozer[2] written in Go, Arakoon[3]
> written in OCaml, ConCoord[4] written in Python.

<snip>

Have been idly thinking about this for a few days.

Gluster already uses both C and Python, so ConCoord sounds like the
best option to investigate from those.

Saying that because the possible addition of another language into
Gluster - and not for trivial bits - really, really, worries me. :(

We did that with Aeolus (both Python and Ruby), and it was an
_extremely_ bad idea in hindsight.  Every time non-trivial problems
occurred between a Ruby part and a Python part, we couldn't get
"just anyone" in the project to fix it.

We had to get people involved (simultaneously) who know both
languages well, their debugging tools, etc.

  i.e. Bottleneck / choke point. :(

It can also be a strong deterrent to getting new features in, if
they touch "the other language" part in non-trivial ways... again,
not just anyone can do it.

So, even if ZooKeeper/doozer/Arakoon are wonderful... please not
them. :)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
Open Source and Standards @ Red Hat

twitter.com/realjustinclift