Event Details

Crystal is the first open and extensible Software-Defined Storage architecture for OpenStack Swift. Crystal provides simplified policy-based storage management to system administrators in an "If-This-Then-That" (IFTTT) form. These policies can change the behavior of  the system by transparently intercepting object requests with storage transformations or filters ("That"). The enforcement of filters may be static or dynamic based on monitoring metrics ("This"). Crystal's dashboard extends Horizon for enabling administrators to write policies and monitor the system.

Crystal integrates several storage filters and monitoring metrics that demonstrate its feasibility. For instance, Crystal handles policies that enforce data compression or caching on object requests based on a container's activity, or it can enforce multi-tenant bandwidth differentiation.

Moreover, both storage filters and inspection metrics can be plugged-in at runtime to extend the system's capabilities.