[Gluster-devel] [Gluster-users] Proposal to mark few features as Deprecated / SunSet from Version 5.0

Fri Jul 20 07:05:42 UTC 2018

On Thu, Jul 19, 2018 at 6:46 PM, mabi <mabi at protonmail.ch> wrote:

> Hi Amar,
>
> Just wanted to say that I think the quota feature in GlusterFS is really
> useful. In my case I use it on one volume where I have many cloud
> installations (mostly files) for different people and all these need to
> have a different quota set on a specific directory. The GlusterFS quota
> allows me nicely to manage that which would not be possible in the
> application directly. It would really be an overhead for me to for example
> to have one volume per installation just because of setting the max size
> like that.
>
> I hope that this feature can continue to exist.
>
>
Thanks for the feedback. We will consider this use-case.

> Best regards,
> M.
>
>
>
> ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
> On July 19, 2018 8:56 AM, Amar Tumballi <atumball at redhat.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Over last 12 years of Gluster, we have developed many features, and
> continue to support most of it till now. But along the way, we have figured
> out better methods of doing things. Also we are not actively maintaining
> some of these features.
>
> We are now thinking of cleaning up some of these ‘unsupported’ features,
> and mark them as ‘SunSet’ (i.e., would be totally taken out of codebase in
> following releases) in next upcoming release, v5.0. The release notes
> will provide options for smoothly migrating to the supported configurations.
>
> If you are using any of these features, do let us know, so that we can
> help you with ‘migration’.. Also, we are happy to guide new developers to
> work on those components which are not actively being maintained by current
> set of developers.
> *List of features hitting sunset:*
> *‘cluster/stripe’ translator:*
>
> This translator was developed very early in the evolution of GlusterFS,
> and addressed one of the very common question of Distributed FS, which is
> “What happens if one of my file is bigger than the available brick. Say, I
> have 2 TB hard drive, exported in glusterfs, my file is 3 TB”. While it
> solved the purpose, it was very hard to handle failure scenarios, and give
> a real good experience to our users with this feature. Over the time,
> Gluster solved the problem with it’s ‘Shard’ feature, which solves the
> problem in much better way, and provides much better solution with existing
> well supported stack. Hence the proposal for Deprecation.
>
> If you are using this feature, then do write to us, as it needs a proper
> migration from existing volume to a new full supported volume type before
> you upgrade.
> *‘storage/bd’ translator:*
>
> This feature got into the code base 5 years back with this *patch*
> <http://review.gluster.org/4809>[1]. Plan was to use a block device
> directly as a brick, which would help to handle disk-image storage much
> easily in glusterfs.
>
> As the feature is not getting more contribution, and we are not seeing any
> user traction on this, would like to propose for Deprecation.
>
> If you are using the feature, plan to move to a supported gluster volume
> configuration, and have your setup ‘supported’ before upgrading to your new
> gluster version.
> *‘RDMA’ transport support:*
>
> Gluster started supporting RDMA while ib-verbs was still new, and very
> high-end infra around that time were using Infiniband. Engineers did work
> with Mellanox, and got the technology into GlusterFS for better data
> migration, data copy. While current day kernels support very good speed
> with IPoIB module itself, and there are no more bandwidth for experts in
> these area to maintain the feature, we recommend migrating over to TCP (IP
> based) network for your volume.
>
> If you are successfully using RDMA transport, do get in touch with us to
> prioritize the migration plan for your volume. Plan is to work on this
> after the release, so by version 6.0, we will have a cleaner transport
> code, which just needs to support one type.
> *‘Tiering’ feature*
>
> Gluster’s tiering feature which was planned to be providing an option to
> keep your ‘hot’ data in different location than your cold data, so one can
> get better performance. While we saw some users for the feature, it needs
> much more attention to be completely bug free. At the time, we are not
> having any active maintainers for the feature, and hence suggesting to take
> it out of the ‘supported’ tag.
>
> If you are willing to take it up, and maintain it, do let us know, and we
> are happy to assist you.
>
> If you are already using tiering feature, before upgrading, make sure to
> do gluster volume tier detach all the bricks before upgrading to next
> release. Also, we recommend you to use features like dmcache on your LVM
> setup to get best performance from bricks.
> *‘Quota’*
>
> This is a call out for ‘Quota’ feature, to let you all know that it will
> be ‘no new development’ state. While this feature is ‘actively’ in use by
> many people, the challenges we have in accounting mechanisms involved, has
> made it hard to achieve good performance with the feature. Also, the amount
> of extended attribute get/set operations while using the feature is not
> very ideal. Hence we recommend our users to move towards setting quota on
> backend bricks directly (ie, XFS project quota), or to use different
> volumes for different directories etc.
>
> As the feature wouldn’t be deprecated immediately, the feature doesn’t
> need a migration plan when you upgrade to newer version, but if you are a
> new user, we wouldn’t recommend setting quota feature. By the release
> dates, we will be publishing our best alternatives guide for gluster’s
> current quota feature.
>
> Note that if you want to contribute to the feature, we have *project
> quota based issue open* <https://github.com/gluster/glusterfs/issues/184>[2]
> Happy to get contributions, and help in getting a newer approach to Quota.
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
>
> These are our set of initial features which we propose to take out of
> ‘fully’ supported features. While we are in the process of making the
> user/developer experience of the project much better with providing well
> maintained codebase, we may come up with few more set of features which we
> may possibly consider to move out of support, and hence keep watching this
> space.
>
> [1] - *http://review.gluster.org/4809* <http://review.gluster.org/4809>
>
> [2] - *https://github.com/gluster/glusterfs/issues/184
> <https://github.com/gluster/glusterfs/issues/184>*
>
>
> Regards,
>
>
> Vijay, Shyam, Amar
>
>
>
>

-- 
Amar Tumballi (amarts)
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