Open Stack

Swift is a scalable and durable storage engine for storing unstructured data. It's been proven time and time again in production in clusters all over the world.

We in the Swift developer community are constantly looking for ways to improve the codebase and deliver a better quality codebase to users everywhere. During the past year, the Rackspace Cloud Files team has been exploring the idea of reimplementing parts of Swift in Go. Yesterday, they released some of this code, called "hummingbird", for the first time. It's been proposed to a "feature/hummingbird" branch in Swift's source repo.

https://review.openstack.org/#/c/178851

I am very excited about this work being in the greater OpenStack Swift developer community. If you look at the patch above, you'll see that there are various parts of Swift reimplemented in Go. During the next six months (i.e. before Tokyo), I would like us to answer this question:

What advantages does a compiled-language object server bring, and do they outweigh the costs of using a different language?

Of course, there are a ton of things we need to explore on this topic, but I'm happy that we'll be doing it in the context of the open community instead of behind closed doors. We will have a fishbowl session in Vancouver on this topic. I'm looking forward to the discussion.


--John




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