[Gluster-devel] [Focus Area] Gluster Experience for Developers and Integrations (GEDI)

[Niels de Vos]

One of the goals for Gluster is to have integrations with/for other
projects. The Gluster project is adopting a structure based upon "Focus
Areas". There are listed in the GitHub project at [0].

The name for the "focus area" started as "Developer Experience". But
this term is used a lot recently, and it can have many different
interpretations. A few Red Hat engineers will be spear heading the
efforts of this team, and we have decided on a more suitable, and
hopefully better understandable name:

  Gluster Experience for Developers and Integrations
  [ which also gives the nice abbreviation of "GEDI" :D ]

The team has a pretty diverse experience, making it very suitable to
work on integrations with different projects. Our main tasks will
consist out of the following (in no particular order):

 - gfapi enhancements and maintenance
   This includes leading discussions about new functionality that other
   projects would like to see. Samba, NFS-Ganesha and QEMU integrations
   will most likely have most requirements. The GEDI team would be
   verifying the requirements and make sure they are useful for many
   different consumers.

 - language bindings and integrations
   Bindings for different programming languages are available already.
   Most of these are not feature complete, have not been packaged for
   easy consumption, or are tested automatically. Addressing these
   missing topics is important for the team, so that integrations can
   use stable and functional bindings.
   Using the bindings to supply plugins/modules/... to other projects
   will be supported by the team too. Hopefully we will be able to
   provide patches for integration with Gluster to other projects as
   well.

 - object storage - S3 support
   Many micro-services like to use the S3 protocol for accessing data.
   At the moment, Gluster has a few options, but none seems optimal. We
   will be investigating different solutions to get a functional S3
   service on top of Gluster.

 - block storage
   QEMU already has block storage support for Gluster through its
   block/gluster driver. The team will keep working with the QEMU
   maintainers to keep the QEMU driver current, and where possible
   provide patches for improvement.
   iSCSI is one of the main protocols that users would like to use in
   combination with Gluster. Prasanna already has been researching the
   options that are possible with tcmu-runner [1]. Further details on
   the iSCSI integration  will become available soon.


In order to track our progress and requests from other projects, we will
use a GitHub project[2]. This makes it possible for us and others to see
where we are heading with the different tasks. Some of the items will
affect the main glusterfs sources, but many will be done with other
projects that have their own bug trackers and the like. The GitHub
project will be our 'hub'.

We would like to make it as easy as possible for other projects to get
in touch with the GEDI team. For that, we propose a mailinglist
(integration at gluster.org) dedicated for engineers that are involved in
Gluster integrations. The main gluster-devel list will most likely
contain too much traffic for developers that do not care about the core
of glusterfs. The new mailinglist may be configured to have its emails
*also* sent to the gluster-devel list so that a wider audience is
reached.

Please let us know if there are any concerns, questions or other
feedback.

Kind regards, the currently confirmed GEDI members,

Saravanakumar Arumugam
Sahina Bose
Prasanna Kalever
Ramesh Nachimuthu
Sachidananda URS
Niels de Vos


[0] https://github.com/gluster/glusterfs/projects/2
[1] www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-devel/2016-December/051652.html
[2] https://github.com/gluster/glusterfs/projects/3
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 801 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-devel/attachments/20161214/36b81449/attachment.sig>