Introducing the Gluster Community Forge

Today, I’m happy to finally unveil something that we’ve been working on for a couple of months now: the Gluster Community Forge. We noticed some time ago that there were several projects out on the internet that extended GlusterFS, and we thought it would be nice to give them a home, where users could find the software and developers could collaborate on it.

And then we thought we would take it a step further – why not create a Gluster distribution of not only the core GlusterFS code, but also the associated projects that reach a level of maturity where it’s usable by a wider audience? There’s also a growing movement around the area of open software-defined storage, where users and developers are increasingly viewing storage as a problem to be solved in software. In our view, the innovation in this domain will migrate to an open source model, because it’s the agility of users and developers collaborating on projects that tends to win out in the end.

We notice a few other things that will come to define this space:

• Single namespace – Operators want to send their data to “the cloud” and be able to access it from multiple points
• Platform agnostic – It’s your data, you should be able to access it the same ways and with the same tools, whether the data lives in a public cloud, your private (bare metal) infrastructure, or sitting on a hypervisor
• Unified, poly-protocol – Again, it’s your data -you should be able to access the same data regardless of the protocol spoken by your apps and tools: NFS, FUSE, S3, Swift, SMB, HDFS, Etc. We’re not all the way there yet, but we’re progressing in that direction
• Commodity hardware – With all the intelligence in the open source software, you no longer need to make that proprietary, high-dollar black box investment
• Open source – There’s really no debate here, is there?

The creation of the Gluster Community Forge will help to speed things along on those fronts, and that’s what it’s really all about – using the power of community to outflank the proprietary, freedom-sucking stalwarts of the storage industry.

So go visit the Gluster Community Forge and go to town – happy hacking!