Open Stack

We just released Swift 1.6.0 last Monday
( https://lists.launchpad.net/openstack/msg15505.html ). We've got a lot
of great features and improvements in it, and I wanted to take some
time to update the wider community about where Swift is.

Swift 1.4.8 was included with the last OpenStack realease (Essex).
Since then, all of the OpenStack projects have been working towards
OpenStack's Folsom release. It is scheduled for the end of September.
This summer, Swift has made two major releases (1.5.0 and 1.6.0). We
will most likely have one more release of Swift before Folsom is cut.
This next release will be included in OpenStack Folsom.

So what can you expect from swift in the Folsom release? Looking at at
the CHANGELOG, there are some exciting changes coming.

First, swift now has deep integration with statsd. This allows for
simple integration into existing statsd monitoring systems and
provides real-time monitoring of nearly every aspect of a swift
cluster. This feature is documented at
http://docs.openstack.org/developer/swift/admin_guide.html#reporting-metrics-to-statsd.
We have also expanded swift-recon to support all
types of servers in the cluster and to report on many of the
background processes used by swift. These features together allow
swift deployers to know exactly what is going on in their clusters.

Also, swift now supports versioned writes. With this feature enabled,
PUTs to an existing object will not overwrite that object but instead
move the current contents into a new location. A complete overview for
versioning is at http://docs.openstack.org/developer/swift/overview_object_versioning.html.

Swift has greatly improved its support for SSD-based account and
container storage. A new db_preallocation config flag can be set to
enable or disable preallocation of swift's sqlite databases. Enabling
preallocation minimizes disk fragmentation (good for spinning drives),
and disabling it maximizes usable space on the drive (good for SSDs).

We have also separated the client tools from swift and moved them into
python-swiftclient. This change benefits other projects that want to
integrate with swift. They can now install supported client tools
without needing to install all of swift.

We have also separated the swift3 middleware from swift. The code is
now managed apart from swift and is found at
https://github.com/fujita/swift3.

Finally, the swift-keystone middleware has moved from the keystone
project into the swift project. This allows those who know swift best
to support the code that ties the two projects together.

Swift's developer community has continued to grow. Since the Essex
release, Swift has had 30 contributors, 13 of whom are new. This
brings us to a total of 71 contributors.

I'm excited about delivering these features in Folsom. Thanks to all
of the contributors for your hard and thoughtful work on swift.

I'll be sending another email shortly about where swift is going in
grizzly and beyond. Stay tuned for more.

--John


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/pkcs7-signature
Size: 4329 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack/attachments/20120813/e8e87e87/attachment.bin>