OpenStack has mature and powerful support for block storage devices. Allowing solutions architects to easily house traditional local file systems for data storage.
A busy cloud application at scale needs horizontal scalability and High Availability for all of the layers in the stack. This means Catalyst has been deploying a range of clustered file system solutions inside cloud platforms since 2012.
Catalyst have had exposture with NFS, OCFS2, DRBD, CEPH and GlusterFS. We will talk about our experiences here, especially with GlusterFS usage in anger.
In this presentation we will talk about the journey we are still on in finding the best fit for a file system inside a large fully-orchestrated cloud application stack.
We'll also socialising some mistakes that we think people making when choosing a file storage solution and remind everyone why clustered/networked file systems are a bit of a pain and why it makes sense to start thinking about object storage for more and more use cases.
Attendees should learn that there is more to implementing file systems for you application in the cloud than just attaching a block device to a compute node. And that as time moves forward we should all be thinking of ways to make use of Object storage and NoSQL solutions such as Redis/Mongo/Memcached.
We will also give some good operational guides on when to deploy GlusterFS, NFS, and/or DRBD and what are the gotchas and considerations.