I'm pleased to announce that Swift 2.4.0 is available. As always, you can upgrade to this version with no end-user downtime. This release has several very nice features, so I recommend that you upgrade as soon as possible.
You can find the release at: https://launchpad.net/swift/liberty/2.4.0
Please note the dependency and config changes in the full release notes: https://github.com/openstack/swift/blob/master/CHANGELOG
This release is the result of 55 code contributors, including 29 first-time code contributors. These are the first-time code contributors:
Timur Alperovich Kazuhiro Miyahara Minwoo Bae Takashi Natsume Tim Burke Ondrej Novy Carlos Cavanna Falk Reimann Emmanuel Cazenave Brian Reitz Clément Contini Eran Rom Oshrit Feder Hamdi Roumani Charles Hsu Atsushi Sakai Joanna H. Huang Azhagu Selvan SP Bill Huber Alexandra Settle Jaivish Kothari Pradeep Kumar Singh Zhao Lei Victor Stinner Ben Martin Akihito Takai Kenichiro Matsuda Kai Zhang Michael Matur
I'd like to call out a few significant changes in this release. Please read the release notes in the link above for more information about these new features.
* Allow one or more object servers per disk deployment
This new deployment model allows you to set the number of object servers per drive. The basic change is that you add every drive into the ring at a different port, and Swift will automatically run the configured number of server processes for each drive. This results in per-disk isolated IO so that one slow disk does not slow down every operation to that server. This change can dramatically lower request latency and increase requests per second.
* Improve performance for object writes to large containers
When an object is written in Swift, the object servers will attempt to update the listing in the appropriate container server before giving a response to the client. If the container server is busy, object latency increases as the object server waits for the container server. In this release, the object server waits less time (and the wait time is configurable) for the container server response, thus lowering overall latency. Effectively, this means that object writes will no longer get slower as the number of objects in a container increases.
* Users can set per-object metadata with bulk upload
Bulk uploads allow users to upload an archive (.tar) to Swift and store the individual referenced files as separate objects in the system. Swift now observes extended attributes set on these files and appropriately sets user metadata on the stored objects.
* Allow SLO PUTs to forgo per-segment integrity checks.
Previously, each segment referenced in the manifest also needed the correct etag and bytes setting. These fields now allow the "null" value to skip those particular checks on the given segment.
There are many other changes that have gone into this release. I encourage you to review the release notes and upgrade to this release.
Thank you to everyone who contributed to this release. If you would like to get involved in Swift, please join us in #openstack-swift on freenode IRC.
--John