HekaFS

What is CloudFS

CloudFS is built on top of Gluster. It provides a set of translators to make Gluster more suitable as a cloud file system. CloudFS is a feature for the Fedora 16 release, and the Fedora Cloud special interest group (SIG) is actively involved in development and testing.

The Fedora CloudFS feature page has information about the status of CloudFS as a feature in a future release of Fedora.

See Jeff Darcy's CloudFS blog to learn more about the philosophy of CloudFS and find out what's happening with CloudFS development.

How to use CloudFS

CloudFS Setup has rudimentary instructions, including where to get source and RPMs, for installing CloudFS on a cluster, including a simple web-based UI to provision CloudFS volumes.

General CloudFS discussions are at: https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cloudfs-general

Red Hat Cloud OpenShift uses CloudFS. The user community for that product is found at: http://www.redhat.com/openshift/forums

How to participate in CloudFS

Let's start with some important links.

• The upstream project overview (slides, blog posts) is at http://cloudfs.org/cloudfs-overview/
• The source repository is at: http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/?p=CloudFS.git
• The developer mailing list is at: https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cloudfs-devel
• The user mailing list (pretty empty so far) is at https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cloudfs-general

CloudFS is still under active development, so there are still many ways to contribute. Here are some possibilities.

• Use it, report bugs, suggest features. The packaging and documentation are still works in progress, so this might require some interaction with one of the developers, but we don't bite. Feel free to contact jdarcy@fedoraproject.org, jdarcy@redhat.com, or jeff@pl.atyp.us - all the same person - and I'd be delighted to help you through it.

• Use the upstream (http://gluster.org), report bugs, suggest features. For the most part, CloudFS is GlusterFS with a couple of extra bits, so many of the issues you're likely to experience are actually GlusterFS issues. CloudFS is not just its own code, though. It's also a sort of unofficial "CloudFS SIG" within the GlusterFS community. If you want GlusterFS fixes or enhancements because of your interest in CloudFS, we can drive those as part of CloudFS.

• Say hi in Freenode IRC. #cloudfs is pretty dead (let's fix that), but #gluster and #fedora-cloud are pretty lively.

• Help with packaging. None of the current CloudFS developers are all that good with specfiles and stuff, so help here would be greatly appreciated.

• Help with documentation. There are several bits of documentation in the source tree, but a little loving from a genuine wordsmith would go a long way.

• Improve the user interface. There is a web-based management UI with pretty good functionality - here are some screenshots and stuff - but the user experience is pretty old-school. If you're a real web programmer who knows all the modern AJAX/JavaScript ways of doing stuff, or a graphic designer, I'm sure you could make something a lot better.

• Improve the core code. Some parts of CloudFS are practically done, but others are still in active development and there's still plenty of room for more developers. In particular, if you're a security/cryptography expert, more review of those pieces would be most welcome. People might look at CloudFS as a more secure alternatives to Dropbox or Jungledisk, both of which have had problems in this area recently, so this is a great area to focus on. Despite being a file system this is not kernel code, by the way. It should be relatively free of those additional complications and comprehensible to non-kernel programmers.

• Get the word out. The number of participants is directly proportional to the number of people who've heard about it, and some people who might want to contribute might not even know we're here. Blog, tweet, whatever, let people know that there's an open-source project to create a scalable, secure, multi-tenant filesystem.