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

Thu Jul 19 12:43:02 UTC 2018

On Thu, Jul 19, 2018 at 6:06 PM, Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote:

> Too bad the RDMA will be abandoned. It's the perfect transport for
> intranode processing and data sync.
>
>

> I currently use RDMA on a computational cluster between nodes and gluster
> storage. The older IB cards will support 10G IP and 40G IB. I've had some
> success with connectivity but am still faltering with fuse performance. As
> soon as some retired gear is reconnected I'll have a test bed for HA NFS
> over RDMA to computational cluster and 10G IP to non-cluster systems.
>
> But it looks like Gluster 6 is a ways away so maybe I'll get more hardware
> or time to pitch in some code after groking enough IB.
>
>
We are happy to continue to make releases with RDMA for some more time if
there are users. The "proposal" is to make sure we give enough heads up
about the experts in that area not having cycles to make any more
enhancements to the feature.

> Thanks for the heads up and all the work to date.
>

Glad to hear back from you! Makes us realize there are things which we
haven't touched in some time, but people using them.

Thanks,
Amar

>
> On July 19, 2018 2:56:35 AM EDT, 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’
>> featureGluster’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*
>>
>>
>>
> --
> Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. All tyopes are thumb related
> and reflect authenticity.
>

-- 
Amar Tumballi (amarts)
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