Open Stack

I'd like to announce my candidacy for Swift PTL for the Wallaby cycle.

This past year, Swift celebrated ten years running in production. Much 
has changed in that time: new features have been developed and polished, 
versions of Python have come and gone, and clusters have grown to 
staggering capacities. However, our commitment to operational excellence 
remains the same.

Recently (particularly in the last several months), I've noticed our 
contributors increasingly have an operator's mindset. We look for more 
and better ways to measure Swift. We seek to reduce client impacts from 
config reloads and upgrades. We take greater ownership over the health 
and performance of our clusters. To a large extent, we're all operators now.

The benefits have been enormous. We've improved performance; we've 
upgraded without disrupting any client requests; we've migrated clusters 
to Python 3 to position them well for the next ten years. Through it 
all, clients put ever more data into Swift.

The increases in demand bring almost incomprehensible scales. We now see 
individual clusters sustaining tens of thousands of requests every 
second. We see containers with a billion objects. We see expansions that 
are as large as many whole clusters were just a few years ago.

This is our next great challenge: how do we move away from a world where 
expansions are a rarity that may require a bit of a scramble and into a 
world of constant expansion? How can we effectively manage clusters with 
thousands of nodes? How do we shift from thinking in terms of petabytes 
to exabytes? I can't wait to see how we rise to meet this challenge.

Tim Burke