Get Yer 3.4 Beta – Open Community FTW

As the GlusterFest winds down today, I wanted to write a few words about GlusterFS 3.4 and the beta that was just released yesterday.

You may have noticed the news release from Red Hat:

The Red Hat Storage team would like to congratulate the Gluster Community on the beta release of GlusterFS 3.4. With new features and enhancements in cloud, virtualization, and performance, the beta version of GlusterFS 3.4 brings high reliability, scalability, and data mobility to users and application developers.

And then listing many of the great features in this release:

VM Image Handling and QEMU Integration

• QEMU integration with libgfapi
• New Block Device translator
• Support for FUSE bypass using libgfapi
• Performance improvements for VM image storage for KVM

…also this

Server Quorum, Security, and Glusterd

• Quorum for split-brain resolution now supports replica 2 configurations
• Support for SSL-based encryption of ‘in-flight’ data
• Multi-threaded glusterd for better performance
• Duplicate Request Cache (DRC) for GlusterNFS to prevent data loss from RPC failures
• Operating version support for glusterd, enabling easier upgrades and using multiple versions of GlusterFS
• NFSv3 ACL support

But to my community eyes, the greatest part of this release is mentioned here:

The Gluster community is extremely appreciative to the key GlusterFS contributors, such as Bharata B. Rao, M. Mohan Kumar and Deepak C. Shetty from IBM. GlusterFS is only successful through input and feedback from the community, so we welcome your comments.

The greatest accomplishment of GlusterFS 3.4 is that Red Hat didn’t contribute the signature feature of this release – that came from the engineers mentioned above. They’re the ones who made the QEMU integration and block storage translator happen. This is a wonderful thing – it shows that all the efforts in the past 2 years to make this community more open are bearing significant fruit.

Here’s a rundown of things we’ve done to make this possible:

• Removal of contributor license agreement
• Formation of community advisory board
• Gluster Community Forge
• Non-stop global evangelism

For the last year, I’ve led Gluster Community workshops at LinuxCon Japan, LinuxCon Europe, LinuxCon North America, OSCON, Intel’s campus at Shanghai (where I am now), as well as presented on GlusterFS at too many conferences and meetups to mention. It’s been an amazing year, watching the Gluster Community grow and prosper as it has.

Download 3.4 beta 1.

Happy hacking!