[Gluster-devel] 4.0 ideas

[Jeff Darcy]

Last week, those of us who were together in Bangalore had a meeting to
discuss the GlusterFS 4.0 plan.  Once we'd covered what's already in
the plan[1] we had a very productive brainstorming session on what else
we might want to consider adding.  Here are some of my notes, in no
particular order, for discussion either here on the list or in person at
the upcoming Barcelona summit.

* Traffic throttling
  Many internal services need this to keep from crowding out new user
  requests.

* Centralized logging

* Third-party copy (server to server, at client request)
  AIUI both SMB and NFS can make such requests, which we currently must
  satisfy by "bouncing" data through the proxy node.  We could add it to
  GFAPI as well, for users there who also want to avoid the extra
  network traffic.

* Better memory management (talloc, maybe even a real garbage collector)

* Virtual nodes (DHT feature to improve rebalance behavior)

* Hot-spare nodes/bricks

* Better faiure detection
  Detecting failures via pairwise heartbeat (what we do now) doesn't
  work at scale.  This might become part of the GlusterD v2 plan.

* File level snapshots.

* Finer-grain version/feature negotiation between nodes.

* Better GFID-to-path translation

* Retire NFSv3

* Make snapshots more modular (not solely dependent on LVM)

* FTP or STFP (sshfs) client using GFAPI
  I've proposed this as a potential intern project.

[1] http://www.gluster.org/community/documentation/index.php/Planning40