Gluster Community announces Gluster 4.0
The Gluster Community recently premiered the latest version of the open source software scalable network filesystem, Gluster 4.0, with new features focused on container integration and storage management.
Gluster was founded in 2005 with the goal of simplifying storage using open source software and commodity hardware. Red Hat acquired the storage Gluster file system for approximately $136 million in 2011. The purpose of the acquisition, according to Red Hat, was to define a new baseline for how enterprise IT manage big data, whether deployed on-premises or in the public cloud.
The latest version of Gluster is specifically designed to make the platform a more well-suited infrastructure for cloud-native developers, and to meet the needs of both small and large installations. Its deployment options enable Gluster to be used in diverse environments, including bare metal hardware, virtual machines, containers and public clouds.
Among the new features of Gluster 4.0 includes GlusterD-2, which serves as a distributed management engine. GlusterD-2 includes a set of REST-based application program interfaces (APIs) for volume and membership operations, enabling DevOps practices to be adopted for infrastructure automation and consumption. It also includes a plugin framework to help make it easier to developers to add metrics.
Additionally, Gluster 4.0 includes deeper integration with Kubernetes with a provisioning tool called Heketi used to the lifecycle of GlusterFS volumes. While previous versions of Gluster used the tool, the latest version can now use Heketi to connect with the GlusterD-2 management engine.
Other new features of Heketi include support for provisioning Gluster-block backed persistent volumes and expanding persistent volumes; custom volume names for persistent volumes; Prometheus metrics collection for Gluster volumes; improved device management; and an enhanced database.
Additionally, Gluster 4.0 include protocol changes on account an on-wire Remote Procedure Call (RPC) version, which improves XDR constructs, adds more defined members and a new dictionary that improves encoding and decoding processes.
“Since the beginning of active development 13 years ago, the Gluster community has sought to build one of the most flexible storage technologies available. With this release, Gluster brings scalability and flexibility to help meet the storage requirements of the modern workloads,” said Amye Scavarda, Gluster community lead, Red Hat, in a statement. “The Gluster community seeks to design leading software-defined storage technology and we look forward to new advancements they bring.”
