Open Stack

Through extensive work from the entirety of the Swift dev team over the past year, storage policies have landed in Swift. Last Friday, we merged commit 1feaf6e2 which brings storage polices into master.

I especially would like to publicly thank Paul Luse (Intel), Clay Gerrard (SwiftStack), and Sam Merritt (SwiftStack) for providing such tremendous focus, dedication, awesome ideas, and leadership to getting this feature designed, written, and merged.

For those that don't know, storage policies are a way to take the global footprint of your Swift cluster and choose what subset of hardware to store the data on and how to store it across that subset of hardware. For example, a single Swift cluster can now have data segmented by geographic region or performance tier. Additionally, each policy can have a different replication factor, which enables high replication for local access (e.g. one copy in every PoP) or low replication for some data (e.g. image thumbnails or transcoded video).

Storage policies is the necessary building block to allow non-replicated storage (i.e. erasure codes) in Swift, a feature that we are continuing to develop.

Full documentation, including design, usage, and upgrade notes, can be found at http://swift.openstack.org/overview_policies.html.

With this commit landing, we have tagged Swift 2.0.0.rc1. We are now having a two week QA period to allow community members to play with it in their labs. At the end of the RC period, we'll formally release Swift 2.0. The current target for this is Thursday July 3 (although I realize that discovered issues and the US holiday may put this at risk).

In addition to participating in the OpenStack integrated release cycle, Swift makes semantically-versioned releases throughout the year. Because of the scope of the storage policies changes and because you cannot safely downgrade your cluster after configuring a second policy (i.e. you'd lose access to that data if you go to a pre-storage-policies release), we have chosen to bump the major version number to 2.

Note that deployers can still upgrade to this version with no client downtime and still safely downgrade until multiple policies are configured.

The full CHANGELOG for the 2.0 release is at https://github.com/openstack/swift/blob/master/CHANGELOG.

If you are using Swift, please read over the docs, download the tarball from http://tarballs.openstack.org/swift/swift-2.0.0.rc1.tar.gz, and let us know what you find.

--John




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