Kaushal M

The new Gluster-4.0 release with GlusterD-2.0 makes Gluster easier to scale, manage, integrate and develop for. Learn how this benefits users and developers.

Gluster is free and open source software scalable network filesystem. Gluster can be installed and easily configured on commodity hardware to provide a general purpose, posix-compliant storage system. Gluster can be accessed from anywhere using the traditional NFS and SMB protocols, or with the native Gluster client. A more complete overview of Gluster and its capabilities can be found here.

Gluster-4.0 is the new upcoming major release of GlusterFS, planned for very early 2018. Gluster-4.0 brings in many new changes and features, the biggest being GlusterD-2.0.

GlusterD is the native distributed management framework of Gluster. It is a core part of the Gluster experience. GlusterD-2.0 is a ground-up reimplementation of the management framework for Gluster-4.0, that is more scalable, easier to use and easier to integrate with than before.

This presentation will provide a attendees with an overview of Gluster, Gluster-4.0 and GlusterD-2.0. New users will get to know what Gluster is, and how it can help their storage needs. Existing users will get to know what to expect when upgrading to Gluster-4.0, and prepare for it. Developers will get to know how they Gluster-4.0 and GD2 make it easier to develop for and integrate with Gluster.

GlusterD-2.0 (GD2) is a new implementation of the GlusterFS management daemon, which attempts to fix a lot of issues with the current management daemon.

This talk will give the listeners an overview of the problems that GD2 is attempting to solve and how it solves them.

GlusterFS is a highly modular distributed filesystem. The translator model used by GlusterFS allows new filesystem features to be easily developed and included in GlusterFS.

But the GlusterFS management daemon, GlusterD, makes it hard for developers to actually get their new features into the hands of end users. Almost any new filesystem feature needs to have code written for it in GlusterD to ensure it is actually available for use. GlusterD, unlike the rest of GlusterFS, is a single monolithic, with a very large, undocumented and hard to navigate code base. This makes it very hard for feature developers to integrate their feature in GlusterD. In addition to this, GlusterD makes it harder for GlusterFS to scale, harder to integrate with external projects and takes up a lot of maintenance effort.

GlusterD-2.0 (GD2) is a ground up re-implementation of the management daemon, designed from the beginning to overcome the above problems. GD2 and its internal frameworks are designed to be flexible, extensible and pluggable. GD2 makes it easier for developers to integrate their newer features into GlusterFS as well as allow easier integration of GlusterFS and other projects. In this talk, we'll be covering how GD2 and the new frameworks work to solve the problems above.

This talk will be useful for developers interested in working on/with GlusterFS, users who want to understand how GlusterFS manages itself and people with a general interest in management and distributed systems.

Go doesn't have native ability to create and use plugins during runtime. As of Go1.5, there are 2 ways of doing plugins. 1. Using inter-process communication and stand alone programs. 2. Using a scripting language and an embedded VM.

I'll be discussing the pros and cons of each, and discuss how to implement both approaches.