The Gluster Blog

Gluster blog stories provide high-level spotlights on our users all over the world

Sharding – What next?

Gluster
2015-12-24

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:

  1. Your experience testing sharding with VM store use case — any bugs you ran into, any performance issues, etc.
  2. 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.

BLOG

  • 06 Dec 2020
    Looking back at 2020 – with g...

    2020 has not been a year we would have been able to predict. With a worldwide pandemic and lives thrown out of gear, as we head into 2021, we are thankful that our community and project continued to receive new developers, users and make small gains. For that and a...

    Read more
  • 27 Apr 2020
    Update from the team

    It has been a while since we provided an update to the Gluster community. Across the world various nations, states and localities have put together sets of guidelines around shelter-in-place and quarantine. We request our community members to stay safe, to care for their loved ones, to continue to be...

    Read more
  • 03 Feb 2020
    Building a longer term focus for Gl...

    The initial rounds of conversation around the planning of content for release 8 has helped the project identify one key thing – the need to stagger out features and enhancements over multiple releases. Thus, while release 8 is unlikely to be feature heavy as previous releases, it will be the...

    Read more