[openstack-dev] [Swift] PTL candidacy

John Dickinson me at not.mn
Mon Mar 31 18:01:44 UTC 2014


I'm announcing my candidacy for Swift PTL. I've been involved with Swift specifically and OpenStack in general since the beginning. I'd like to continue to serve in the role as Swift PTL.

Swift has grown quite a bit over the last 4 years. In this past year, we've added major new features refactored significant areas of the code to improve efficiency and extensibility. We've added support for global clusters. We've significantly refactored replication to be more efficient. We've cleaned up the volume interface to make it much simpler to extend. Swift is a great storage engine, powering some of the world's largest storage clouds. Let's keep making it better.

Going forward, I'd like to address four things in Swift in the next year:

1) Finish storage policies, including erasure code support. In my opinion, this is the biggest feature in Swift since it was open-sourced, and I'm really excited by the opportunities it enables. I sent an email earlier this month about our current plan on getting storage policies finished up: http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2014-March/030937.html

2) Focus on performance and efficiency rather than on a "feature train". We've started on several things here, including the "ssync" replication improvements and some profiling middleware. I'd also like to see improvement in replication bandwidth efficiency (especially with global clusters), time-to-first-byte latency improvement, better support of very dense storage, and support higher concurrency with less resources.

3) Better QA. Swift has always been a very stable system. We need to ensure that it remains stable, especially as new feature go in and other parts of the codebase change. Examples here include better functional test coverage, testing against real clusters, more end-to-end testing of workflows, running probetests automatically against submitted changes, and tracking performance metrics against patches. 

4) Better community efficiency. As the community has grown, we need to get better at offering feedback channels from production deployments, especially from non-developers. We need to get better at reducing the patch review time and encouraging newer developers to jump in and offer patches.

These are the things that I want to focus on as PTL in the next 6 to 12 months. My vision for Swift is that everyone will use it every day, even if they don't realize it. Together we can make it happen.

--John




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