Open Stack

I'm happy to announce that Swift 2.0.0 has been officially released! You can get the tarball at http://tarballs.openstack.org/swift/swift-2.0.0.tar.gz.

This release is a huge milestone in the history of Swift. This release includes storage policies, a set of features I've often said is the most important thing to happen to Swift since it was open-sourced.

What are storage policies, and why are they so significant?

Storage policies allow you to set up your cluster to exactly match your use case. From a technical perspective, storage policies allow you to have more than one object ring in your cluster. Practically, this means that you can can do some very important things. First, given the global set of hardware for your Swift deployment, you can choose which set of hardware your data is stored on. For example, this could be performance-based, like with flash vs spinning drives, or geography-based, like Europe vs North America.

Second, once you've chosen the subset of hardware for your data, storage policies allow you to choose how the data is stored across that set of hardware. You can choose the replication factor independently for each policy. For example, you can have a "reduced redundancy tier", a "3x replication tier", and also a tier with a replica in every geographic region in the world. Combined with the ability to choose the set of hardware, this gives you a huge amount of control over how your data is stored.

Looking forward, storage policies is the foundation upon we are building support for non-replicated storage. With this release, we are able to focus on building support for an erasure code storage policy, thus giving the ability to more efficiently store large data sets.

For more information, start with the developer docs for storage policies at http://swift.openstack.org/overview_policies.html.

I gave a talk on storage policies at the Atlanta summit last April. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLC1qasklQo

The full changelog for this release is at https://github.com/openstack/swift/blob/master/CHANGELOG.

--John




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