Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by notmyname 5818 days ago
I'm a developer on swift (OpenStack storage == Rackspace Cloud Files). We've been pretty excited about opening this, and I'd love to answer any questions you have.

Swift documentation is at http://swift.openstack.org. Check out the "SAIO - Swift All In One" page to see how to set up a VM to run it. With some very small tweaks, you can also run it on a single slice (mount a loopback device rather than another virtual drive).

Although I don't know as much about it, the compute docs are at http://nova.openstack.org
3 comments
mdasen 5818 days ago
I'd be curious to hear how Swift compares to MogileFS. MogileFS never took off like memcached did, but it's another piece of infrastructure that came out of LiveJournal and similarly allows one to create a storage architecture where files are redundantly stored on commodity nodes.

I'm guessing that both Amazon and Rackspace took a look at MogileFS and its architecture so it would be informative to hear what you liked and what you might have found lacking.

link
notmyname 5818 days ago
Interestingly, our first implementation of Cloud Files was based on MogileFS. It's a decent design, but it doesn't scale to the levels we need. The central DB that stores the metadata was the bottleneck.
link
Goladus 5818 days ago
How does openstack compare to Eucalyptus?

http://www.eucalyptus.com/

link
notmyname 5818 days ago
Eucalyptus tries to match Amazon's APIs, and (from hearsay) it doesn't scale well.

Openstack doesn't match Amazon's APIs. Nova (compute) is used by NASA and will be used by Rackspace Cloud Servers. Swift (storage) is currently used by Rackspace Cloud Files. Swift (my area of expertise) is production-ready code that is scalable to massive levels (think 100-petabyte clusters and 100000 requests per second).

link
LiveTheDream 5818 days ago
From http://openstack.org/projects/, most open-source cloud solutions don't scale with the exception of the software behind NASA's Nebula cloud, which as of April was Eucalyptus.
link
blueberry 5818 days ago
What languages/frameworks/tools did you use to develop swift and other openstack technologies? Also are there benchmarks that compares swift to other cloud computing systems out there?
link
notmyname 5818 days ago
swift is built entirely in Python using libraries like eventlet, greenlet, and WebOb.

Because benchmarks are very sensitive to deployment details, the only thing I can point you to is comparisons between Rackspace Cloud Files and Amazon S3. Of course, even then there are all kinds of variables like cluster size and network connectivity.

link