I wanted to take a moment and share all the things that are going on in the Gluster Community. It really has been an amazing year, and we’re only halfway through. Here’s a recap for those of you watching from home:
Launched the Gluster Community Forge in early May – http://forge.gluster.org/
Announced the charter members of the Gluster Community: Intel, Red Hat, DataLab.es, OSUOSL, Linux Foundation, Hortonworks, NTTPC
As we looked at the growth of the Gluster Community over the last year, it became clear that the community has evolved to be more than Red Hat, and that we needed a governance model that recognized this growth. For example, there are countless projects scattered across the internet that utilize GlusterFS, but there was no “one-stop shop” to find them. We also knew there are many organizations that contribute to the success of the Gluster Community, but there was no way to formalize their involvement. And finally, we understood that this movement of which we are a part, the movement away from traditional, proprietary storage vendors, needed a name: Open Software-defined Storage.
In response, we have plotted out a series of steps to make the Gluster Community vision grander, more ubiquitous, and more integral to open source cloud and big data communities than ever before. Here are just some of the things that you can expect to see:
Graduation of incubating projects. Leading candidates thus far include gluster-swift, pmux and gflocator. The former cements our standing in the OpenStack object storage camp, and the latter two form a very interesting project that allows users to conduct file-based Map/Reduce jobs on distributed Gluster volumes.
GlusterFS 3.4 – we are very very close to GA. Hang tight This is the release that includes QEMU integration and libgfapi, a new client library for developers
Much better performance for the vast majority of workloads. This will become more apparent when you try the imminent releases of 3.3.2 or 3.4.0.
Gluster Community Software Distribution. As the Gluster Community forms a software ecosystem around GlusterFS, we will formalize a timely release schedule that allows multiple projects to participate.
Higher frequency of point releases. This has been a big deal the past year. We have worked hard to fix this, and you’ll notice it very shortly.
More and better integration with multiple projects that make up OpenStack, CloudStack and Hadoop distributions
New Gluster.org site with complete redesign from the ground up and new branding
More Gluster Community Workshops, including at OSCON, LinuxCon North America & Europe, Stockholm, London and more. If you would like to run a Gluster Community Workshop in your area, contact us – cfp@gluster.org
More presence at OpenStack Summit , Hadoop Summit, Apache CloudStack Collaboration Conference and other related events. Gluster engineers will be more visible than ever at open source cloud and big data events
These steps are essential for building on our momentum and making a successful community that will, in turn, make all participants and collaborators more successful.
Want to be part of a winning team? Get involved – host a meetup, present at a workshop or conference, help out new users on gluster-users and #gluster.
We’re deeply committed to making the Gluster community a wide tent for innovation in cloud storage, and we want to know how we can serve you in this mission. Let us know what you’d like to see from us and how we can best meet your needs:
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...
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...
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...