[Gluster-devel] Gluster API out of Unix environment

[Niels de Vos]

On Fri, Jun 02, 2017 at 12:13:53AM -0400, Prashanth Pai wrote:
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "XoD" <xoddark at gmail.com>
> > To: gluster-devel at gluster.org
> > Sent: Thursday, 1 June, 2017 8:08:08 PM
> > Subject: [Gluster-devel] Gluster API out of Unix environment
> > 
> > Hello, in my company we are looking for a most efficient solution to
> > distribute a lot of small files, for a lot of clients.
> > 
> > We are considering using Glusterfs for this (Or Ceph) as our server
> > infrastructure.
> > On the client side we want to access data as object directly from the
> > application.
> > Our applications will not run in an Unix environment (Windows among others).
> > But unfortunately the Gluster API (Or Ceph API) depends on Unix technologies
> > and headers.
> > 
> > So to summarize our needs for the API are :
> > - put new files on a volume
> > - read files on the volume
> > - remove files on the volume
> > We do not need to update any files after the first write.
> > 
> > For the moment, here is our current investigation status:
> > We have tried to build the api (libglusterfs) in a Msys/Mingw environment,
> > but all dependencies are not available.
> > We are considering to modify libglusterfs to replace Unix dependencies, but
> > it's seems a lot of work.

The interface you would use in applications is in libgfapi.so. This
library depends on libglusterfs and others. There is already support for
Linux, NetBSD and partially (untested?) FreeBSD and Mac OSX. Adding
support for an other UNIX-like implementation (Mingw, Cygwin, ..) should
be doable, but might not be trivial.

> > We are considering to reimplement the client library, but I haven't found
> > documentation about the communication protocol of libglusterfs api.
> > We are also considering to create a new (simpler) API, possibly based on
> > http, but we need to know how implement the server part.
> 
> 
> You can put and get files as objects using gluster-swift project. This happens
> over HTTP protocol with requests and responses conforming to Swift or S3 API.
> https://github.com/gluster/gluster-swift

This is my suggestion as well. gluster-swift (with the Swift3 add-on) is
an OS independent way of doing this.

> > Without any knowledge of the internal Gluster’s functionality it's not easy,
> > and I haven't found any documentation about it.

The protocol is very sparsely documented, so writing a new
implementation from scratch that will be difficult and a *lot* of work.
Because Gluster is based on translators on both the client- and
server-side, behaviour may change subtly depending on what features are
enabled on the Gluster volume. Adding a new implementation will also
require you to keep it updated whenever new functionalities are added to
the protocol.

> > So here are my questions:
> > Does anybody have advices/warnings about how we can achieve any of the afore
> > mentioned ports ?
> > Or know any open source library project to access to Gluster files/objects
> > from (at least) a Windows application.

The best advise we can give is to abandon the idea of a Windows native
Gluster implementation. Either use the (OpenStack) Swift, (Amazon) S3 or
NFS/SMB protocols, the last two might have native Windows libraries too.

Please keep us informed about your approach and plans, even if you
decide to use something else as Gluster.

Thanks and good luck!
Niels
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