[Gluster-users] Scalability - File system or Object Store

[Jeff Darcy]

On 12/09/2013 10:57 AM, Randy Breunling wrote:
> From any experience...which has shown to scale better...a file system
>  or an object store?

In terms of numbers of files/objects, I'd have to say object stores.  S3
and Azure are both over a *trillion* objects, and I've never heard of a
filesystem that size.  In terms of performance it might go the other
way.  More importantly, I think the object stores give up too much in
terms of semantics - e.g. hierarchical directories and rename, byte
granularity, consistency/durability guarantees.  It saddens me to see so
many people working around these limitations in their apps based on
object stores - duplicating each others' work, creating
incompatibibility (e.g. with a half dozen "conventions" for simulating
hierarchical directories), and sometimes even losing data to subtle
distributed-coordination bugs.  An app that uses a subset of an
underlying filesystem's functionality is far more likely to be correct
and portable than one that tries to build extra abstractions on top of a
bare-bones object store.