[Gluster-users] Gluster Community Newsletter, February 2016

[Amye Scavarda]

What a busy month this past month for Gluster!
We’ve got updates from SCaLE, FOSDEM, our Developer Gatherings in
Brno, DevConf, noteworthy threads from the mailing lists, and upcoming
events.
This post is also available on the Gluster blog:
http://blog.gluster.org/2016/02/gluster-community-newsletter-february-2015/

>From SCaLE:
- Richard Wareing gave a talk at the Southern California Linux Expo
about Scaling Gluster at Facebook. More at
https://blog.gluster.org/2016/01/scaling-glusterfs-facebook/

>From FOSDEM:
Humble and Kaushal have posted thoughts on FOSDEM
http://website-humblec.rhcloud.com/me-fosdem-2016/
https://kshlm.in/fosdem16/

>From Developer Gatherings:
We had a group of developers gather in Brno ahead of DevConf to
discuss a number of different Gluster related things.
Highlights were:
GD2 with Kaushal - https://public.pad.fsfe.org/p/gluster-gd2-kaushal
Heketi & Eventing with Luis - https://public.pad.fsfe.org/p/gluster-heketi
DHT2 with Venky-  https://public.pad.fsfe.org/p/gluster-4.0-dht2

>From DevConf
Ceph vs Gluster vs Swift: Similarities and Differences
https://devconfcz2016.sched.org/event/5lze/ceph-vs-gluster-vs-swift-similarities-and-differences
Prashanth Pai, Thiago da Silva

Automated GlusterFS Volume Management with Heketi
https://devconfcz2016.sched.org/event/5m0P/automated-glusterfs-volume-management-with-
heketi   - Luis Pabon
NFS-Ganesha and Distributed Storage Systems -
https://devconfcz2016.sched.org/event/5m15/nfs-ganesha-and-distributed-storage-systems
-   Kaleb S. Keithley

Build your own Scale-Out Storage with Gluster
https://devconfcz2016.sched.org/event/5m1X/build-your-own-scale-out-storage-with-gluster
0 Niels de Vos

Freak show (#2): CTDB -- Scaling The Aliens Back To Outer Space
https://devconfcz2016.sched.org/event/5m1l/freak-show-2-ctdb-scaling-the-aliens-back-to-outer-space
Günther Deschner, Michael Adam

oVirt and Gluster Hyperconvergence
https://devconfcz2016.sched.org/event/5m20/ovirt-and-gluster-hyperconvergence
Ramesh Nachimuthu

Improvements in gluster for virtualization usecase
https://devconfcz2016.sched.org/event/5m1p/improvements-in-gluster-for-virtualization-usecase
Prasanna Kumar Kalever

Test Automation and CI using DiSTAF
https://devconfcz2016.sched.org/event/5m1U/test-automation-and-ci-using-distaf
Vishwanath Bhat
Gluster Developer Gatherings at Brno before DevConf


 Noteworthy threads:
 Soumya Koduri investigates the issue of memory leaks in GlusterFS FUSE
client and suggests a re-run after application of a few specific
patches. More at
<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2016-January/024775.html>.
Oleksandr reported that it did not make an impact; Xavier confirmed a
similar issue with 3.7.6 release
(<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2016-January/024932.html>).
The thread (at <https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2016-January/thread.html#24775>)
is a good read around the topic of understanding how to work through
diagnosis and fixes of memory leaks.

Sachidananda provided an update
(<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2016-January/024790.html)
about the gdeploy v2.0 including design changes
(<https://github.com/gluster/gdeploy/blob/master/doc/gdeploy-2) to
enable modularity and separation of core functionality into
self-contained unit.

Kyle Harris reported an issue around high I/O and processor
utilization (<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2016-January/024811.html>).
Ravishankar, Krutika and Pranith worked with the reporter to identify
specific ways to address the topic. Pranith indicated that a 3.7.7
release is coming up soonest
(<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2016-January/024836.html>)

A query was raised about the 3.6.8 release notes
(<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2016-January/024820.html>)
and a suggestion to include them at
<http://download.gluster.org/pub/gluster/glusterfs/> Niels responded
stating that the notes should be part of the repository at
<https://github.com/gluster/glusterfs/tree/release-3.6/doc/release-notes>
and added the release manager to provide additional detail

Vijay provided an update around the changes being discussed for 3.8
(<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2016-January/024828.html>).
The maintainers feel it is worthwhile to include some of the key
features for 4.0 eg. NSR, dht2, glusterd2.0 as experimental in the
release; ensure a better component coverage for tests in distaf; add a
forward compatibility section to all the feature pages proposed for
3.8 in order to facilitate review for the Gluster.next features. In
the same mail Vijay proposed that Niels de Vos would be the maintainer
for the 3.8 release. And lastly, the projected GA date for 3.8 is now
set to end-May or, early-June 2016.

Ramesh Nachimuthu linked to a blog around designing HyperConverged
Infrastructure using oVirt 3.6 and Gluster 3.7.6
(<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2016-January/024849.html>).
More at <http://blogs-ramesh.blogspot.in/2016/01/ovirt-and-gluster-hyperconvergence.html>

Lindsay Mathieson brought up the topic of 'File Corruption when adding
bricks to live replica volumes'
(<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2016-January/024920.html>).
Further along the discussion
(<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2016-January/025010.html>)
Krutika volunteered to write in detail about the specifics of the heal
activity and client+server side heal design.

A discussion around heal processes
(<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2016-January/025042.html>)
led to a description of a large deployments that consists of over 1000
clients. Again, this is a thread where debugging and diagnosis of
GlusterFS issues in large deployments are highlighted along with the
typical workload.

DHT2:
(<http://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-devel/2016-February/048371.html>)
A new presentation from Shyam was added around developments in DHT2.

++ gluster-devel ++

Pranith and Joseph discuss
(<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-devel/2016-January/048006.html>)
the issue where using ctime/mtime causes confusion for application
software especially for backup which identifies the differences in the
values and attempts to suggest remedies.

Ravishankar introduced a proposal
(<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-devel/2016-January/047975.html>)
around a throttling translator on the server side to regulate FOPS. He
believes that it will address frequently posted issues around AFR,
Self-Heal consuming high CPU and causing resource starvation. The
proposal plans to use the Token Bucket Filter algorithm (also used by
bitrot) to regulate the check-sum calculation.

Richard Wareing pointed
(<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-devel/2016-January/047964.html>)
to a bug report <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1301401>
"Mis-behaving brick clients (gNFSd, FUSE, gfAPI) can cause cluster
instability and eventual complete unavailability due to failures in
releasing entry/inode locks in a timely manner".  The locks revocation
feature was part of his talk at SCaLE14x

Raghavendra Talur has initiated a thread
(<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-devel/2016-January/thread.html#47941>)
on tips and tricks which can be collated and become an useful resource
for new developers contributing to GlusterFS. Vijay added specifics
from his work flow
<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-devel/2016-January/048000.html>
and others provided insights.

Niels de Vos picks up the conversation
(<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-devel/2016-January/047903.html>)
around closing bug reports filed against a mainline version. He
proposed that the Bug Report Life Cycle policy could be defined and
updated. In addition to that, the script/bugzilla query used to
retrieve the bugs could be stored in the release-tools repository, to
be run after each release.

As a lead to his talk at FOSDEM on "Gluster Roadmap, Recent
Improvements and Upcoming Features", Niels de Vos sought
(<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-devel/2016-January/047862.html>)
short description from the feature owners/developers to be able to
include in his slide deck.

Avra asked for inputs
(<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-devel/2016-January/047841.html>)
on a possible name for 'New Style Replication' (or, NSR) to make it
less generic and more representative of the fundamental design idea.

Kaleb provided an update
(<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-devel/2016-January/047808.html>)
on Python 3.5 being approved for Fedora 24 and suggested that the
requirement for Python 2 be looked into and discussed. Prashant
suggested usage
(<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-devel/2016-January/047823.html>)
of "six" module to help maintain code that will run on both Python 2
and Python 3.

Humble responded
(<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-devel/2016-January/047956.html>)
that the search feature of documentation and readthedocs.org was known
to be broken due to rearrangement of the directory structures of
'features' and 'feature planning' and was expected to be addressed
soon.

++ gluster-infra ++

Raghavendra Talur informed
<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-infra/2016-January/001790.html>
about enabling comment based triggers on the Jenkins instance

Michael Scherer informed about a Gerrit outage
<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-infra/2016-January/001785.html>
in order to fix issues around index of the Lucene datastore used by
Gerrit. Later on he was happy to note that the time taken was lesser
than estimated and things worked according to plan.

In a thread around the possibility of enabling individual accounts (on
Jenkins) for maintainers, Michael brought up a topic of governance
(<https://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-infra/2016-January/001766.html>)
around who can be considered a 'contributor' and is thus entitled to
such privileges. He highlights the need for setting clear qualifying
criteria which can then use the FreeIPA infrastructure available to
access and privilege controls.


Upcoming events
FAST   - Feb 22 -  25 <https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast16>
Vault  -  April 20-21 <http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/vault>

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Amye Scavarda | amye at redhat.com | Gluster Community Lead