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Announcing Gluster Container Storage 0.1

Atin Mukherjee
2018-10-09

Today, we are announcing the availability of GCS (Gluster Container Storage) 0.1. This initial release is designed to provide a platform for community members to try out and provide feedback on the new Gluster container storage stack. This new stack is a collaboration across a number of repositories, currently including the main GCS repository [1], core glusterfs [2], glusterd2 [3], and gluster-csi-driver [4].

Getting started
The GCS repository provides a VM-based (Vagrant) environment that makes it easy to install and take GCS for a test-drive. See https://github.com/gluster/gcs/tree/master/deploy#local-cluster-using-vagrant for a set of instructions to bring up a multi-node cluster with GCS installed. The Ansible-based deploy scripts create a Kubernetes cluster using kubespray, then deploy the GCS components. These playbooks can also be used to bring up GCS on other Kubernetes clusters as well.

Current features
This is the initial release of the GCS stack. It allows dynamic provisioning of persistent volumes using the CSI interface. Supported features include:

  • 1×3 (3-way replicated) volumes
  • GCS should be able to recover from restarts of any individual GCS-related pod. Since this is the initial version, bugs or feedback on improvements will be appreciated in a form of github issue in the respective repos.

Next steps
Adding e2e testing for nightly validation of entire system
Will be adding gluster-prometheus for metrics. The work under this can be tracked at the gluster-prometheus repo [5]
Starting work on operator to deploy and manage the stack through anthill [6]
Bi-weekly update to the community on the progress made on GCS.

GCS project management
GCS and the other associated repos are coordinated via waffle.io for planning and tracking deliverables over sprints.
Cross-repo coordination of milestones and sprints will be tracked through a common set of labels, prefixed with “GCS/”. For example, we already have labels for major milestones defined like ‘GCS/alpha1’ , ‘GCS/beta0’. Additional labels will be created for each sprint so that the respective teams can tag planned deliverables in a common way.

Collaboration opportunities

  • Improving install experience
  • Helping w/ E2E testing framework
  • Testing and opening bug reports

Relationship to Heketi and glusterd (the legacy stack)
While GCS is shaping the future stack for Gluster in containers, the traditional method for deploying container-based storage with Gluster (and current GlusterD) and Heketi is still available, and it remains the preferred method for production usage. To find out more about Heketi and this production-ready stack, visit the gluster-kubernetes repo [7].

Regards,
Team GCS

[1] https://github.com/gluster/gcs 
[2] https://github.com/gluster/glusterfs
[3] https://github.com/gluster/glusterd2
[4] https://github.com/gluster/gluster-csi-driver/
[5] https://github.com/gluster/gluster-prometheus
[6] https://github.com/gluster/anthill
[7] https://github.com/gluster/gluster-kubernetes

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