I would like to discuss the trade offs of a local file system in the cloud. Google now runs over 80% of its storage on ext4 as opposed to ext2. We can discuss the advantages and benefits we gained from this upgrade in performance. Google has seen over 100% performance improvements and availability in many dimensions for its workloads. Hopefully we can relate our experience in upgrading a large cloud ecosystem file system while it is still running. Ext4 is just a first step towards our achieving our goals in local file system cloud storage. It still presents many challenges and surprises. Cloud local file systems have different requirements than desktops or even server file systems. Everything from needing to extend fsync semantics to Linux's lack of advanced performance file system tools can cause havoc in a data center. Many of these are characteristic of all Linux file systems and need to be addressed for Linux to provide a full featured cloud ready local file system. Linux is running more and more cloud storage solutions, from facebook to myspace to that local startup in your nephew's basement. Understanding what the community sees as the future in this area, and exchanging experiences is important to raise the bar for Linux file systems in the cloud. It should be fun too. mrubin -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
