Open Stack

On 2014-08-11 5:13 PM, Sandy Walsh wrote:
> Right, I'm not suggesting to remove the storage abstraction layer. I'm
> just curious what gnocchi does better/different than InfluxDB?
>

I was at the OpenStack Design Summit when Gnocchi was presented.

Soon after the basic goals and technical details of Gnocchi were 
presented, people wondered why InfluxDB wasn't used. AFAIK, people 
presenting Gnocchi didn't know about InfluxDB so they weren't able to 
answer the question.

I don't really blame them. At that time, I didn't know anything about 
Gnocchi, even less about InfluxDB but rapidly learned that both are 
DataSeries databases/services.


What I would have answered to that question is (IMO):

Gnocchi is a new project tackling the need for a DataSeries 
database/storage as a service. Pandas/Swift is used as an implementation 
reference. Some people love Swift and will use it everywhere they can, 
nothing wrong with it. (or lets not go down that path)


 > Or, am I missing the objective here and gnocchi is the abstraction layer
 > and not an influxdb alternative? If so, my apologies for the confusion.
 >

InfluxDB can't be used as-is by OpenStack services. There needs to be an 
abstraction layer somewhere.

As Gnocchi is (or will be) well written, people will be free to drop the 
Swift implementation and replace it by whatever they want: InfluxDB, 
Blueflood, RRD, Whisper, plain text files, in-memory, /dev/null, etc.

But we first need to start somewhere with one implementation and 
Pandas/Swift was chosen.

I'm confident people will soon start proposing alternative storage 
backends/implementations better fitting their needs and tastes.

-- 
Mathieu