[Gluster-devel] GlusterFS and cloud storage

Peter Walter peterdhue at gmail.com
Wed May 8 09:22:59 UTC 2013


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are proprietary and/or unpublished.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





More information about the Gluster-devel mailing list