[Gluster-devel] Gluster Monthly Newsletter, January 2015 Edition

[Amye Scavarda]

We're kicking off an updated Monthly Newsletter, coming out mid-month.
We'll highlight special posts, news and noteworthy threads from the
mailing lists, events, and other things that are important for the
Gluster community.

== Community Survey Followup ==
http://blog.gluster.org/2016/01/gluster-community-survey-report-2015/

== News and Noteworthy Threads from the Mailing Lists ==
++ gluster-users ++

Lindsay Mathieson and Krutika collaborated on testing sharding
improvements and performance
<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2015-December/024568.html>
as part of Krutika's post on the improvements to sharding translator
specific to the VM image store use case

<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2015-December/024538.html>
observations that the libgfapi based access to volumes are slower than
FUSE received a bit of discussion including debugging. Further in this
thread the specific workbench exhibiting the behavior was described
<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2015-December/024648.html>

Amye notes that in the interest of making the documentation usable a
review of the MediaWiki based content was completed before plans to
switch on the Github based wiki pages. More at
<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2015-December/024583.html>

Defect resolution discussion around diagnosing volume rebalance
failure - <https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2015-December/024604.html>.
Sakshi and Susant work through the sequence of questions and responses
in order to identify the root cause and provide resolution.

++ gluster-devel ++
Vijay proposes a new plan for 3.8, looking to bring some 4.0 features
into 3.8, testing in distaf, adding forward compatibility and naming a
release manager for 3.8. This pushes out the timeline for 3.8 to end
of May/early June. More at
<http://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-devel/2016-January/047729.html>

As part of his work on the eventing framework for Gluster, Samikshan
posted a summary of the ideas and work completed. He has been working
on ensuring notifications from each node is available for
introspection as well as aggregating all the signals/notifications
across a deployed cluster. More at
<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-devel/2015-December/047251.html>

Niels put together a high level task breakdown to support SELinux over
FUSE mounts - <https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-devel/2015-December/047262.html>.
At present one cannot set a SELinux context over a FUSE mount as FUSE
does not include support.

Krutika has worked on the sharding feature for GlusterFS with specific
focus on enabling the VM image store use case. Now she has provided a
small note on the features and more technical description of the
internals. <https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-devel/2015-December/047268.html>

Pranith has been using different forums to discuss the compound FOP
(re)design ideas with the intent to reduce network round-trips. He
puts together a first pass summary of his ideas at
<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-devel/2015-December/047297.html>
The post received extensive discussion with participation from both
NFSv4 and SMB developers. The reviews were summed up in another draft
and posted. This, in turn, had a number of queries from Jeff Darcy
<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-devel/2016-January/047618.html>

The design for the User and Group Quota support in GlusterFS has been
posted for review
<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-devel/2015-December/047315.html>

Vijay expresses concern about the backlog in reviews
<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-devel/2015-December/047330.html>
and seeks to have some ideas as to how to create a way to reduce the
backlog and make it more manageable.

<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-devel/2015-December/047391.html>
Luis Pabon and Sachidananda Urs collaborate to understand integration
work between gDeploy and Heketi

Atin followed up on the RFC call on the GlusterD2.0 ReST API design
<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-devel/2015-December/047432.html>

The test failure and hangs on NetBSD have been a topic of conversation
through the month of December. This month Pranith and Krutika have
volunteered time to help make the tests better for NetBSD. More at
<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-devel/2016-January/047672.html>

Atin requested the feature leads to update the Gluster 4.0 Roadmap
Page <https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-devel/2016-January/047626.html>
with description of the features and specifications.

Raghavendra Talur's work on some test profiling enabled a set of
observations. Vijay responded with suggestions on using ramdisk for
/var/lib/glusterd with the objective of improving latencies for the
volume operations.
<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-devel/2016-January/047554.html>

++ gluster-infra ++
Raghavendra Talur initiates a discussion around enabling developers to
build a test environment which is identical to the Gluster community
test infrastructure. Detail and link to bugzilla at
<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-infra/2015-December/001558.html>

Michael Scherer ponders on moving the infrastructure management piece
to Ansible. At present the Gluster community infrastructure uses Salt.
Michael provides a well reasoned note on why the move to using Ansible
is good - <https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-infra/2016-January/001594.html>

NetBSD tests and regressions come up for discussion -
<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-infra/2016-January/001609.html>

== Upcoming Events ==
FOSDEM:
* Gluster roadmap, recent improvements and upcoming features - Niels De Vos
* Go & Plugins - Kaushal Madappa
* Gluster Stand
DevConf
* small Gluster Developer Gathering
* Heketi GlusterFS volume management - Lusis Pabon
* Gluster roadmap, recent improvements and upcoming features - Niels De Vos
FAST

==
Questions? Comments? Want to be involved?
Email amye at redhat.com.
-- 
Amye Scavarda | amye at redhat.com | Gluster Community Lead