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’ 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, but haven’t got enough contributions on it to take it to completion. There were a couple of different approaches attempted too, gluster-subvol and 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.
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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.
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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 (@tumballi)
_______________________________________________ Community Meeting Calendar: APAC Schedule - Every 2nd and 4th Tuesday at 11:30 AM IST Bridge: https://bluejeans.com/836554017 NA/EMEA Schedule - Every 1st and 3rd Tuesday at 01:00 PM EDT Bridge: https://bluejeans.com/486278655 Gluster-devel mailing list Gluster-devel@xxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.gluster.org/mailman/listinfo/gluster-devel
