It would be my honor and pleasure to continue serving you as Swift PTL. The world continues to generate and retain ever-increasing amounts of data, and Swift continues to rise to the challenge of storing that data durably and making it highly available. I'm excited to help us engineer now to be ready for next year's data-center demands. To that end, there are several projects we'll be advancing; in general, these are not short-term, though some pieces will surely come in the next cycle. As hard-drive sizes increase, the lots-of-small-files problem has become a lots-of-files problem. Between 16TB hard drives hitting the market and cost concerns pushing us toward ever more drives per box, even historically "reasonable" object sizes will produce noticeable memory pressure that we'd like to reduce. OVH's explorations in this space give us all a leg up that we should take advantage of. As clusters grow, we must ensure Swift can scale with them. Some aspects of that will be relatively straight-forward, like allowing rings to support more than 64k devices. Other challenges are less well-defined; there are likely improvements that could be made in replication and backend protocols, for example, but there is no single way forward. There will likely be some experiments that never land on master -- but as long as they are in the open and we can all learn from them, they will not be failures. All of that must be driven by what we learn by operating real clusters at scale. To do that, we must improve our metrics and monitoring, and find ways to observe the system dynamically. Post-facto log analysis is not tenable when dealing with tens of thousands of requests per second across hundreds of nodes. At the same time, we cannot neglect our client ecosystem. This extends not just to python-swiftclient, but to S3 clients as well. For better or worse, S3 has become the de facto standard interface for object storage, and we must ensure our compatibility is as seamless as possible. This cycle we added S3-compatible versioning, but there is so much more we could be doing, from object life-cycle management to bucket inventories. As always, we will listen to our users and prioritize addressing their pain points. Tim Burke ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This email message is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential information. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------