Robert Wojciechowski

Filesystem encryption has been readily available since the dawn of times, but it still requires external software to protect against data loss. Many users rely on proprietary cloud storage clients (like Dropbox) to synchronize their encrypted data across multiple devices. SXFS is a GPL licensed FUSE-based filesystem for Linux and OSX, which features client-side encryption (AES256), horizontal scalability and fault-tolerance out of the box. With just two commands you create and mount a fully deniable network storage which keeps your data safe from prying eyes. In this lightning talk I will demonstrate how to get SXFS up and running and how easy it is to maintain and scale out.

Providing full data availability in a degraded cluster requires a mechanism for coordinating changes to cluster membership in an automated way.

While developing our GPL distributed storage solution we researched the state of the art of consensus algorithms to achieve fault-tolerance. Our first stop was Paxos, which turned out to be complex and lacking accurate and comprehensive specifications. Without a reference implementation, confusion reigns supreme, and analyzing all the different variants would have taken us at least 3 months. By contrast Raft defines a single clean way to implement reliable leader election. It controls responsiveness with autonomously made decisions of participation in the cluster, while providing data availability.

In this lightning talk I will recount the road bumps we hit while implementing the consensus algorithm and the headaches we had before we ditched Paxos. With this head start on Raft, I hope to save my fellow developers from the pain we went through!