Open Stack

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



-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 801 bytes
Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail
URL: <http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-announce/attachments/20131212/965839c9/attachment.pgp>