I'm happy to announce that we've released Swift 1.11.0. You can find the high-level Launchpad details (including a link to the tarball) at https://launchpad.net/swift/icehouse/1.11.0.
As always, you can upgrade to this release without any downtime to your users.
Swift 1.11.0 is the work of 26 contributors, including the following 5 new contributors to Swift:
Rick Hawkins Steven Lang Gonéri Le Bouder Zhenguo Niu Aaron Rosen
This release includes some significant new features. I encourage you to read the change log (https://github.com/openstack/swift/blob/master/CHANGELOG), and I'll highlight some of the more significant changes below.
* Discoverable capabilities: The Swift proxy server will now respond to /info requests with information about the particular cluster being queried. This will allow easy programmatic discovery of limits and features implemented in a particular Swift system. The first two obvious use cases are for cross-cluster clients (e.g. common client between Rackspace, HP, and a private deployment) and for deeper functional testing of all parts of the Swift API.
* Early quorum response: On writes, the Swift proxy server will not return success unless a quorum of the storage nodes indicate they have successfully written data to disk. Previously, the proxy waited for all storage nodes to respond, even if it had already heard from a quorum of servers. With this change, the proxy node will be able to respond to client requests as soon as a quorum of the storage nodes indicate a common response. This can help lower response times to clients and improve performance of the cluster.
* Retry reads: If a storage server fails during an object read request, the proxy will now continue the response stream to the client by making a request to a different replica of the data. For example, if a client requests a 3GB object and the particular object server serving the response fails during the request after 1.25GB, the proxy will make a range request to a different replica, asking for the data starting at 1.25GB into the file. In this way, Swift provides even higher availability to your data in the face of hardware failures.
* DiskFile API: The DiskFile abstraction for talking to data on disk has been refactored to allow alternate implementations to be developed. There is an example in-memory implementation included in the codebase. External implementations include one for Gluster and one for Seagate Kinetic drives. The DiskFile API is still a work in progress and is not yet finalized.
* Object replication ssync (an rsync alternative): A Swift storage node can now be configured to use Swift primitives for replication transport instead of rsync. Although still being tested at scale, this mechanism will allow for future development improving replication times and lowering both MTTD and MTTR of errors.
I'd like to publicly thank the Swift contributors and core developers for their work on Swift. Their diverse experience and viewpoints make Swift the mature project it is, capable of running the world's largest storage clouds.
--John