[Gluster-devel] Plans for Gluster 3.8

[Vijay Bellur]

Hey All,

Now that 3.7 is out, here are some thoughts on how we can shape up 3.8. 
I am thinking of releasing Gluster 3.8 towards the end of this year. 
Here is a tentative list of things that we are contemplating to do in 3.8:

1. Improvements for "Storage as a Service"

     "Storage as a Service" broadly refers to the model where storage 
can be provisioned or decommissioned on demand, storage caters to single 
or multi tenant workloads and completely automated provisoning of 
storage is possible. Storage as a Service is what public/private clouds 
use as a building block today. By selecting enhancements and 
improvements that fit into this paradigm, we can make Gluster to be more 
easily adopted in modern datacenters. Following are sample use 
cases/workloads that can benefit by gluster improvements:

  - Manila: File Share as a service project in OpenStack
  - Shared Storage for Containers
  - Any deployment where shares are created as a service


  Enhancements that can be accomplished in this release include:

  a. Intelligent Volume provisioning through Heketi [1]
  b. Kerberized support for GlusterFS protocol
  c. Better network management support [2]


2. Regression test & Quality improvements

We have zeroed in on distaf[3] as the framework of choice where we will 
be adding support for multi-node regression tests. This will augment the 
single node pre-commit regression tests that we already run today with 
Jenkins. I expect tests in distaf passing as a gating factor for GA of 
all releases from 3.8. Here is what we would like to do in this release 
cycle:

a. all gluster components to have tests populated in distaf
b. CI using Jenkins for running tests in distaf on nightlies/release 
candidates


3. Storage for Containers

There seems to be significant attention on storage for containers 
recently. We can cater to this interest by picking specific improvements 
for container storage like:

a. shared storage for applications in containers (already possible with 
nfs today). Explore how we can do this with native client etc.
b. shared storage for docker/container repositories
c. hyperconvergence of containers & storage

4. Hyperconvergence with oVirt

There is an ongoing effort to have hyperconvergence of gluster with 
oVirt for storing virtual machine images in a single cluster [4]. 
Improvements like the following can help in making Gluster a better fit 
for hyperconvergence:

a. Throttling for maintenance operations in gluster 
(self-healing/rebalance etc.)
b. Ensuring data locality for virtual machine images
c. Integration of sharding for hyperconvergence (expect to reach here 
sooner than 3.8)

5. Performance improvements

a. Continue the onoging small file performance improvements [5]
b. multi-threaded self-heal daemon for improving performance of self-healing

6. Other improvements like full fledged IPv6 support, 
delegations/lease-lock improvements, more policies for tiering, support 
for systematic erasure codes, support for native object service etc. are 
also planned.

There are other improvements which are being planned and have not found 
a mention here. If you are aware of such improvements, please reply to 
this thread. I will be collating this information and publish a release 
planning page for 3.8 in gluster.org.

If you have come all the way till here, we would be interested in 
knowing the following:

(i) What are your thoughts on the plan?
(ii) What other improvements would you be interested in seeing?

Thoughts and feedback would be very welcome!

Thanks,
Vijay


[1] https://github.com/heketi/heketi/

[2] 
http://www.gluster.org/community/documentation/index.php/Features/SplitNetwork

[3] https://github.com/gluster/distaf

[4] http://www.ovirt.org/Features/GlusterFS-Hyperconvergence

[5] 
http://www.gluster.org/community/documentation/index.php/Features/Feature_Smallfile_Perf

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