The Gluster community has been working hard to ensure GlusterFS is integrated with each OpenStack storage interface. With that integration, as well as the latest VM image management features, GlusterFS 3.4 is now a first-class citizen of the OpenStack ecosystem.
In this workshop, Eric Harney and John Mark Walker will demonstrate how to deploy OpenStack with GlusterFS as a scale-out storage platform
*today.* They will also detail the four major areas of focus for integration:
Swift: A GlusterFS-backed storage platform has been implemented for the Swift API using the upstream Swift proxy server/API layer. This provides a unified storage backend for object as well as POSIX data.
Glance: While it has been possible to use a mounted GlusterFS volume as the backend data store for Glance for some time, recent development work has enabled an integrated deployment with Cinder, significantly increasing the performance for deploying VM images on GlusterFS volumes.
Cinder: A Cinder integration for the Grizzly release added an option for deploying live VM images on GlusterFS volumes. With recent contributions to the Havana release, you can now utilize the QEMU - libgfapi integration that was released in GlusterFS 3.4, greatly improving the performance of VM image management on GlusterFS.
Libgfapi: With the release of GlusterFS 3.4, the libgfapi client library is now the standard way to integrate applications with GlusterFS.
Following simple examples, Eric and John Mark will demonstrate:
How to deploy a GlusterFS-backed object storage solution, referencing when and why you should use this solution in conjunction with or in lieu of the Swift object storage implementation
How to access the same data via NFS, libgfapi, the GlusterFS client, and the Swift API
The power and flexibility of Libgfapi
In addition, they will provide a brief GlusterFS roadmap tour, discussing upcoming enhancements that will benefit OpenStack operators and developers.