[Gluster-devel] Sharding - what next?

[Krutika Dhananjay]

Hi, 

When we designed and wrote sharding feature in GlusterFS, our focus had been 
single-writer-to-large-files use cases, chief among these being the virtual machine image store use-case. 
Sharding, for the uninitiated, is a feature that was introduced in glusterfs-3.7.0 release with 'experimental' status. 
Here is some documentation that explains what it does at a high level: 
http://www.gluster.org/community/documentation/index.php/Features/sharding-xlator 
https://gluster.readthedocs.org/en/release-3.7.0/Features/shard/ 

We have now reached that stage where the feature is considered stable for the VM store use case 
after several rounds of testing (thanks to Lindsay Mathieson, Paul Cuzner and Satheesaran Sundaramoorthi), 
bug fixing and reviews (thanks to Pranith Karampuri). Also in this regard, patches have been sent to make 
sharding work with geo-replication, thanks to Kotresh's efforts (testing still in progress). 

We would love to hear from you on what you think of the feature and where it could be improved. 
Specifically, the following are the questions we are seeking feedback on: 
a) your experience testing sharding with VM store use-case - any bugs you ran into, any performance issues, etc 
b) what are the other large-file use-cases (apart from the VM store workload) you know of or use, 
where you think having sharding capability will be useful. 

Based on your feedback we will start work on making sharding work in other workloads and/or with other existing GlusterFS features. 

Thanks, 
Krutika 


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