[Gluster-devel] GlusterFS and cloud storage

[Peter Walter]

For a project I am working on, I need to identify (or build) a FUSE 
meta-filesystem driver that will manage cloud storage from disparate 
cloud storage providers as an overlay on top of vendor-specific FUSE 
drivers.  I am currently looking at GlusterFS - perhaps using multiple 
glusterfsd daemons on a server, exporting the cloud file systems as 
volumes, then using a modified glusterfs client process to create a 
composite, unified volume from the multiple cloud file systems.

Now, why would I use vendor-specific FUSE drivers rather than just 
directly on the vendor API, and why do I need two FUSE abstraction 
layers? I understand that two FUSE abstraction layers would be much more 
inefficient than coding one layer to use the APIs of the vendors, but 
cloud drives are not speed demons anyway - and to add an additional API 
would not require a lot of interface glue, I think. In the alternative, 
I would have to consider the idiosyncrasies of every API, and some APIs 
are proprietary and/or unpublished. Since the vendor's drivers would 
have to conform to the published FUSE API, whatever their individual 
idiosyncrasies, the interface should be simpler.

Any comments or suggestions regarding this approach?

Peter