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

Hans Henrik Happe happe at nbi.dk
Tue Mar 19 14:12:15 UTC 2019


On 19/03/2019 14.10, Amar Tumballi Suryanarayan wrote:
> Hi Hans,
>
> Thanks for the honest feedback. Appreciate this.
>
> On Tue, Mar 19, 2019 at 5:39 PM Hans Henrik Happe <happe at nbi.dk
> <mailto:happe at nbi.dk>> wrote:
>
>     Hi,
>
>     Looking into something else I fell over this proposal. Being a
>     shop that are going into "Leaving GlusterFS" mode, I thought I
>     would give my two cents.
>
>     While being partially an HPC shop with a few Lustre filesystems, 
>     we chose GlusterFS for an archiving solution (2-3 PB), because we
>     could find files in the underlying ZFS filesystems if GlusterFS
>     went sour.
>
>     We have used the access to the underlying files plenty, because of
>     the continuous instability of GlusterFS'. Meanwhile, Lustre have
>     been almost effortless to run and mainly for that reason we are
>     planning to move away from GlusterFS.
>
>     Reading this proposal kind of underlined that "Leaving GluserFS"
>     is the right thing to do. While I never understood why GlusterFS
>     has been in feature crazy mode instead of stabilizing mode, taking
>     away crucial features I don't get. With RoCE, RDMA is getting
>     mainstream. Quotas are very useful, even though the current
>     implementation are not perfect. Tiering also makes so much sense,
>     but, for large files, not on a per-file level.
>
>
> It is a right concern to raise, and removing the existing features is
> not a good thing most of the times. But, one thing we noticed over the
> years is, the features which we develop, and not take to completion
> cause the major heart-burn. People think it is present, and it is
> already few years since its introduced, but if the developers are not
> working on it, users would always feel that the product doesn't work,
> because that one feature didn't work. 
>
> Other than Quota in the proposal email, for all other features, even
> though we have *some* users, we are inclined towards deprecating them,
> considering projects overall goals of stability in the longer run.
>  
>
>     To be honest we only use quotas. We got scared of trying out new
>     performance features that potentially would open up a new back of
>     issues.
>
> About Quota, we heard enough voices, so we will make sure we keep it.
> The original email was 'Proposal', and hence these opinions matter for
> decision.
>
>     Sorry for being such a buzzkill. I really wanted it to be different.
>
> We hear you. Please let us know one thing, which were the versions you
> tried ?
>
We started at 3.6 4 years ago. Now we are at 3.12.15, working towards
moving to 4.1.latest.
> We hope in coming months, our recent focus on Stability and Technical
> debt reduction will help you to re-look at Gluster after sometime.
That's great to hear.
>
>     Cheers,
>     Hans Henrik
>
>     On 19/07/2018 08.56, Amar Tumballi 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 detachall the bricks before
>>     upgrading to next release. Also, we recommend you to use features
>>     like dmcacheon 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
>>
>>     [2] - https://github.com/gluster/glusterfs/issues/184
>>
>>     Regards,
>>
>>     Vijay, Shyam, Amar
>>
>>     *
>>
>>
>>
>>     _______________________________________________
>>     Gluster-users mailing list
>>     Gluster-users at gluster.org <mailto:Gluster-users at gluster.org>
>>     https://lists.gluster.org/mailman/listinfo/gluster-users
>
>
>
> -- 
> Amar Tumballi (amarts)
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