[Gluster-Maintainers] GlusterFS 8+: Roadmap ahead - Open for discussion

[Amar Tumballi]

Hello everyone,

This email is long, and I request each one of you to participate and give
comments. We want your collaboration in this big step.

TL;DR;

We are at an interesting time in Gluster project’s development roadmap. In
the last  year, we have taken some hard decisions to not focus on features
and focus all our energies to stabilize the project, and if you notice as a
result of that, we did really well with many regards. With most of the
stabilization work getting into the glusterfs-7 branch, we feel the time is
good for discussing the future.

Now, it is the time for us to start addressing the most common concerns of
the project, Performance and related improvements. While many of our users
and customers have faced problems with not so great performance, please
note that there is no one silver bullet which will solve all performance
problems in one step, especially with a distributed storage solution like
GlusterFS.

Over the years, we have noticed that there are a lot of factors which
contribute to the performance issues in Gluster, and it is not ‘easy’ to
tell which one of the ‘known’ issue caused the particular problem.
Sometimes, even to debug where is the bottleneck, we face the challenge of
lack of instrumentation in many parts of the codebase. Hence, one of the
major activities we want to pick as immediate roadmap is, work on this area.

Instead of discussing on the email thread, and losing context soon, I
prefer, this time, we can take our discussion to hackmd with comments.
Would like each of you to participate and let us know what are your
priorities, what you need, how you can help etc.

Link to hackmd URL here: https://hackmd.io/JtfYZr49QeGaNIlTvQNsaA After the
meeting, I will share the updates as a blog, and once its final, will
update the ML with an email.

Along with this, from the Gluster project, in the last couple of years, we
have noticed increased interest in 2 major use cases.

First is using Gluster in container use cases, and the second is using it
as a storage for VMs, especially with oVirt project, and also as
hyperconverged storage in some cases.

We see more stability and performance improvements should help our usecases
with VMs. For container storage, Gluster’s official solution involved
‘Heketi’ <https://github.com/heketi/heketi> project as the frontend to
handle k8s APIs and provide storage from Gluster. We did try to come up
with a new age management solution with GD2
<https://github.com/gluster/glusterd2>, but haven’t got enough
contributions on it to take it to completion. There were a couple of
different approaches attempted too, gluster-subvol
<https://github.com/gluster/gluster-subvol> and piragua
<https://github.com/gluster/piragua>. But neither of them have seen major
contributions. From the activity in github and other places, we see that
there is still a major need for a proper solution.

We are happy to discuss on this too. Please suggest your ideas.



--------

Another topic while we are at Roadmap is, the discussion on github vs
gerrit. There are some opinions in the group, saying that, we are not
getting not many new developers because our project is hosted on gerrit,
and most of the developer community is on github. We surely want your
opinion on this.

Lets use Doc:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/16a-EyPRySPlJR3ioRgZRNohq7lM-2EmavulfDxlid_M/edit?usp=sharing
for discussing on this.

--------

This email is to kick start a discussion focused on our roadmap, discuss
the priorities, look into what we can quickly do, and what we can achieve
long term. We can have discussions about this in our community meeting, so
we can cover most of the time-zones. If we need more time to finalize on
things, then we can schedule a few more slots based on people’s preference.
Maintainers, please send your preferences for the components you maintain
as part of this discussion too.

Again, we are planning to use collaborative tool hackmd (
https://hackmd.io/JtfYZr49QeGaNIlTvQNsaA) to capture the notes, and will
publish it in a blog form once the meetings conclude. The actionable tasks
will move to github issues from there.

Looking for your active participation.

Regards,

Amar <https://twitter.com/tumballi> (@tumballi)
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