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<p dir="auto">I'd be honored to continue to serve as your PTL for OpenStack Swift.</p>
<h2>Looking back at the Newton cycle</h2>
<p dir="auto">During the Newton cycle, the Swift community has delivered at-rest<br>
encryption. This feature is the culmination of a more than year of<br>
work, and it enables Swift to be deployed in places where it was<br>
previously not possible to be used.</p>
<p dir="auto">The other big thing that's been going on during the Newton cycle is<br>
our work on a Golang implementation of the object server and<br>
replication engine. This change not only solved critical issues for<br>
existing deployments, but it also enables a lot of the future work<br>
that needs to happen in the years to come (more on that later!).</p>
<p dir="auto">Golang in Swift is a great OpenStack community success story. An<br>
existing Swift deployer (Rackspace) was seeing issues in their<br>
environment. One developer there started playing with Golang and<br>
reimplemented a small part of Swift. The results were good--very good<br>
--and the rest of the development team there started focusing on this<br>
Golang implementation. The developers shared these results with the<br>
rest of the community, and the Golang code started being developed in<br>
a feature branch of Swift, where others started playing with this code<br>
as well. Rackspace has been running this in production with great<br>
success, and as a community we're bringing into "mainline" Swift so<br>
that everyone can benefit. It's great to see community members play<br>
with new ideas, bring those to the rest of the community, and see them<br>
adopted to solve problems for everyone.</p>
<p dir="auto">As most people in the Swift community know, and many in the wider<br>
OpenStack community have seen, there has been a very large debate on<br>
the use of Golang in OpenStack projects. Much of my time in this cycle<br>
has been spent working with the TC on this conversation, and I expect<br>
it to continue into the Ocata cycle as well. I'm not satisfied with<br>
the current decision by the TC, and I'll keep pushing for including<br>
Golang inside of OpenStack.</p>
<h2>Looking forward to Ocata and Beyond</h2>
<p dir="auto">Beyond grand debates about programming languages, there's a ton of<br>
stuff going on in Swift right now. Here's a partial list of things<br>
people are working on:</p>
<ul>
<li>Golang object server and replication</li>
<li>Transparent container sharding</li>
<li>Increase ring partition power</li>
<li>Global erasure codes</li>
<li>Policy migrations</li>
<li>Symlinks</li>
<li>Improvements to encryption functionality</li>
<li>Automatic tiering</li>
<li>Composite rings</li>
</ul>
<p dir="auto">Many of these have been in progress for a while, and I fully expect<br>
several to be finished within the Ocata cycle. Many of these features<br>
are related to bigger and bigger clusters. It's tremendously exciting<br>
to see where Swift is being used today, but we're in no way "done".<br>
There is a lot more for us to do to continue to solve storage problems<br>
for users.</p>
<p dir="auto">Looking much further into the future, there's several things I'd like<br>
us to work towards.</p>
<ul>
<li>Small file optimization</li>
<li>Dealing with larger drives and more dense storage servers</li>
<li>Using NV memory</li>
</ul>
<p dir="auto">The reason I know we'll get this stuff done and continue to make Swift<br>
the best open source object storage system is because of our<br>
community. As the Swift PTL, I feel it's my duty to enable the<br>
community to solve these problems by making every community member<br>
more productive. This is my focus.</p>
<p dir="auto">--John</p>
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