Gluster Community releases Gluster 4.0

The Gluster Community, the worldwide collection of developers who contribute to the open source Gluster storage platform, has announced the next version of its scale-out storage solution, Gluster 4.0, including new features designed to enhance integration with containers and improve storage management.

 

The latest version of Gluster, a free and open source software scalable network filesystem, is designed to make the platform a more well-suited infrastructure for cloud-native developers. Gluster is designed to meet the needs of both small and large installations. Its flexible deployment options mean that Gluster can be used in a variety of environments and infrastructures, including bare metal hardware, virtual machines, containers, and public clouds.

 

Gluster 4.0 builds on the project’s prior work to expand capabilities for persistent storage for containers with several new features, including:

 

?      GlusterD-2.0, the distributed management engine for Gluster that is designed to provide better scale for membership of servers in a trusted storage pool. GlusterD-2.0 represents an architecture rewrite that introduces improvements designed to make it more scalable and easier to configure, use, integrate with, and maintain - especially at high scale. GlusterD-2.0 includes a set of ReSTful interfaces for volume and membership operations allowing DevOps practices to be adopted for infrastructure automation and consumption. Because GlusterD-2.0 integrates with an embedded etcd store, it can enable a higher degree of consistency for state management within a trusted storage pool. GlusterD-2.0 also provides a more flexible plugin framework aimed at making it easier for developers to add additional metrics.

 

?      Deeper integration with Kubernetes using Heketi, a dynamic provisioning tool to manage the lifecycle of GlusterFS volumes. The latest version of Heketi introduces several new features that are designed to deepen Gluster’s integration with Kubernetes, including: 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.

 

?      Protocol changes resulting from a new on-wire Remote Procedure Call (RPC) version. This new RPC version improves XDR constructs and adds more defined members and a new dictionary that enhances encoding and decoding processes.

 

?      Performance improvements related to Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS)-compliant systems enabling it to work with software that is designed to meet U.S. government security standards.