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What do you mean by "true data center level"? A FS with posix semantics suitable for normal apps doing file IO or something else?
by ithkuil 7y ago
What do you mean by "true data center level"? A FS with posix semantics suitable for normal apps doing file IO or something else?
- vl 7y agoI would break it down like this: 1) FS-core: provide FS-like semantics on top of D (or Colossus/D). Apart from data format and GC challenges, the piece that is missing is fast DC-level locking service. 2) Then, for VMs you can do FS driver, jump to VMM and booms, you are done, multiple legacy levels of re-packing and redirection are gone. For shared access cases you do NFS/Samba interceptor and then same code path as above. This system would be highly beneficial not only for Cloud, but for other Google properties as well: it would provide normal posix FS to Borg jobs. Amounts of equilibristics required to use any open-source package is enormous and by this time exceeded costs of developing FS multiple times, ask YouTube, MySQL, package management, etc groups. Another example of Google’s storage craziness is cross-dc storage. This should be low-level Colossus responsibility. Instead godzillion of teams implement their own, GCS, PD, Spanner, Placer, etc. Crazy.
- joatmon-snoo 7y agoHaha, yeah, I do wonder about the insanity on a pretty regular basis :) I will say though, that most of the time I don't want to use open source stuff. Observability is pretty crap, I don't want nor need software that uses write() without fsync(), and the assumptions that most OSS makes about FSs gives me nightmares on Borg.