Future

During the one-year evaluation period, I was witness to the introduction of a number new features: For example, documentation [7] was launched, which even describes installation. Also, Skytechnology has hired new developers, probably because of rapid growth: "We are now collaborating on completely replacing the remaining MooseFS code, so we can implement features that were previously not possible," reported Michal Bielicki, head of the DACH region (Germany-Austria-Switzerland) at LizardFS.

These changes should translate to significant improvements in performance and support for IPv6 and InfiniBand. Chief Satisfaction Officer Szymon Haly also announced file-based encryption for the first quarter of 2017 in an interview with Linux Magazine .

Further improvements will introduce advanced ACLs, better logging behavior for Windows clients, and minimal goal setting, which the community has been requesting for some time now, because these settings could improve reliability and data security.

Rumors that Skytechnology wants to share the uRaft proprietary failover component as an open source project were neither confirmed nor denied by company representatives in the interview. However, Adam Ochmanski, the founder and CEO of Skytechnology, had stated on GitHub at the end of August that LizardFS 3.12.0 would include uRaft [8]. It is unclear whether he was referring to the disclosure of the source code or publication in binary form.

It is unfortunate that Skytechnology, the company behind LizardFS, has so far reserved the automatic failover daemon for paying customers. Admins with experience in high availability indeed might be able to set up a working cluster with Pacemaker without a cookbook guide and scripts or tips describing how to do so. A potential for improvement exists in terms of customer-facing communication (roadmap, more documentation, community work), software versioning (small changes always cause a major release), and technical details: An SDS today should come with native encryption for communication between the nodes and data, and it should make sure that write operations remain possible, even if many chunk servers are offline. With just 10 or more active developers, this work is unlikely to be a quick process.