Object Storage and POSIX Should Merge

storagedude writes: Object storage's low cost and ease of use have made it all the rage, but a few additional features would make it a worthier competitor to POSIX-based file systems, writes Jeff Layton at Enterprise Storage Forum. Byte-level access, easier application portability and a few commands like open, close, read, write and lseek could make object storage a force to be reckoned with.

'Having an object storage system that allows byte-range access is very appealing,' writes Layton. 'It means that rewriting applications to access object storage is now an infinitely easier task. It can also mean that the amount of data touched when reading just a few bytes of a file is greatly reduced (by several orders of magnitude). Conceptually, the idea has great appeal. Because I'm not a file system developer I can't work out the details, but the end result could be something amazing.'

Comments

Scalable b/c it's stateless

[HockeyPuck]

One of the great advantages that allows object storage to be scalable is that it's completely stateless. A single command has no dependency on the previous or next command. There's no modification of existing objects, no "seek then write" commands either. This allows object storage to maintain one of the key tenants of being a cloud storage, it's not to provide high availability of a given instance, but to guarantee that the "retry" or the "allocation of a new resource" always succeeds. For example, VMs can go down at anytime, but there should never be an instance whereby you cannot create a new VM to replace the one that just died. While VMs can die at anytime, the VM service (EC2, Nova) can never go down.

With this crap like "seek", "open" then "read" that the author proposes you now have commands that are dependent on each other and thus create state. Something we want to avoid.