Sharding – What next?
In my previous post, I talked about the sharding feature – what it does, where it is useful, etc. You can read that post here: http://blog.gluster.org/2015/12/introducing-shard-translator. When we designed and wrote sharding feature in GlusterFS, our focus had been single-writer-to-large-files use cases, chief among these being the virtual machine image store use-case.
We are happy to announce that we have reached that stage where the feature is considered stable for the VM store use case after several rounds of testing (thanks to Lindsay Mathieson from the community, Paul Cuzner and Satheesaran Sundaramoorthi), bug fixing and reviews (thanks to Pranith Kumar Karampuri) and a couple of performance improvements. Also, patches have been sent to make sharding work with geo-replication, thanks to Kotresh’s efforts (testing still in progress).
We would love to hear from you on what you think of the feature and where you think it can be further improved:. Specifically, the following are two questions we are seeking feedback on:
- Your experience testing sharding with VM store use case — any bugs you ran into, any performance issues, etc.
- what are the other large-file use cases you know of or use, where you think having sharding capability will be useful.
Based on your feedback, we will start work on making sharding work in other workloads and with other existing GlusterFS features.
We look forward to hearing from you.