Gluster: a SWOT Analysis - Vijay Bellur Gluster Summit Prague

1. Gluster - SWOT Analysis
2017
Vijay Bellur
GlusterFS Co-Maintainer
Red Hat
@vbellur

2. What is a SWOT Analysis?

3. Gluster - Strengths
● Hybrid Cloud Storage
● Community Momentum
● Ecosystem Integration
● Use Case Clarity

4. Gluster - Strengths: Hybrid Cloud Storage
● Flexible and easy to run on any platform
● Runs on
○ Physical Machines
○ Virtual Machines
○ Containers
○ Public Cloud
● Data replication across Hybrid Cloud
● Consistent Storage Stack for applications

5. Gluster - Strengths: Community Momentum
● Predictable release cycles
● Brick Multiplexing
● Reblance time estimation
● Statedump for gfapi3.10
Feb 2017

6. Gluster - Strengths: Community Momentum
● Predictable release cycles
● Brick Multiplexing
● Reblance time estimation
● Statedump for gfapi3.10
Feb 2017
● Halo Replication
● Metadata performance
● Rebalance
performance
improvements
3.11
May 2017

7. Gluster - Strengths: Community Momentum
● Predictable release cycles
● Brick Multiplexing
● Reblance time estimation
● Statedump for gfapi3.10
Feb 2017
● Halo Replication
● Metadata performance
● Rebalance
performance
improvements
3.11
May 2017
● Sub-directory mounts
for FUSE
● Gfid to Path by default
● Configurable time zone
for logs
3.12
Aug 2017

8. Gluster - Strengths: Community Momentum
● Upcoming release cycles
● Gfapi support for upcalls
● IPv6 Support
● Discard Support for EC3.13
Nov 2017

9. Gluster - Strengths: Community Momentum
● Upcoming release cycles
● Gfapi support for upcalls
● IPv6 Support
● Discard Support for EC3.13
Nov 2017
● Glusterd2
● Thin client/ gfproxy
● N+1 scaling
4.0
Feb 2018?

10. Gluster - Strengths: Community Momentum
● Upcoming release cycles
● Gfapi support for upcalls
● IPv6 Support
● Discard Support for EC3.13
Nov 2017
● Glusterd2
● Thin client/ gfproxy
● N+1 scaling
4.0
Feb 2018?
● RIO
● Geo-replication to S3
● Performance
improvements
4.1
May 2018?

11. Gluster - Strengths: Community Momentum
● Improved diversity in community (code) contributions
● Broad community leadership - NO SPOF!
○ More Core maintainers
○ More component maintainers & peers
○ $(topdir)/MAINTAINERS in git reflects current status
● More gluster ecosystem projects - gluster-block, gluster-s3, Tendrl
● Experimental branch for innovation

12. Gluster - Strengths: Ecosystem Integration
● Containers
○ Kubernetes, gluster-kubernetes, Heketi

13. Gluster - Strengths: Ecosystem Integration
● Hyperconvergence
○ Ovirt (6 Steps to Nirvana!)
1
2
3
4
5
6

14. Gluster - Strengths: Ecosystem Integration
● NFS Ganesha
● Samba
● Tcmu-runner
● Swift

15. Gluster - Strengths: Use Case clarity
● Scale-out NAS across Hybrid Cloud
● Container Native Storage
● Hyperconvergence for VMs

16. Gluster - Weaknesses

17. Gluster - Weaknesses
● Usability
● Scale
● Automation
● Discoverability of information

18. Gluster - Weaknesses: Usability
● Installation is a breeze, but:
○ Day 2 operations are difficult
○ GUI based management is inadequate
○ Monitoring is painful
○
● [root@deepthought westford]# gluster volume create d disperse disperse-data 4 redundancy 2 hostname1:/brick1
hostname2:/brick1 hostname3:/brick1 hostname4:/brick1 hostname5:/brick1 hostname6:/brick1 hostname7:/brick2
hostname8:/brick2 hostname:/brick3 hostname4:/brick2 hostname5:/brick2 hostname6:/brick2 hostname1:/brick3
hostname2:/brick3 hostname3:/brick3 hostname4:/brick3 hostname5:/brick3 hostname6:/brick3….
●

19. Gluster - Weaknesses: Scale
● Management Scale
○ Being improved with glusterd2
● Data Scale
○ Directory & Metadata improvements with RIO
● Monitoring at Scale
○ Eventing, promotheus?
● Debugging at Scale
○ EFK, better logs

20. Gluster - Weaknesses: Automation
● Insufficient automation of tests wrt features
○ Glusto needs more help and love!
● Lack of automation w.r.t debugging
○ Need tooling for log analysis, performance analysis etc.
● Lack of automation for Day 2
○ gdeploy?
● Non-deterministic release testing
○ Related to point #1

21. Gluster - Weaknesses: Discoverability
● Documentation - continues to be problematic
● Messaging - Not structured, infrequent
● Features to Release mapping
○ Projects in github - solves this problem!

22. Gluster - Opportunities

23. Gluster - Opportunities
● Deeper integration with containers, autonomic computing
● Hardware gamechangers like NVMe/pmem
● Integration with emerging technologies - BlockChain, Machine Learning, IoT
etc.
● Innovate to outperform proprietary storage!

24. Gluster - Threats

25. Gluster - Threats
● Public Cloud
● Emerging & Legacy Proprietary storage
● Lack of Innovation
● Lack of Innovation - Stability balance

26. Questions?