Sosp19 File Systems Unfit Equally Distributed Storage Backends: Lessons From Ten Years Of Ceph Evolution

This newspaper is by  Abutalib Aghayev (Carnegie Mellon University), Sage Weil (Red Hat Inc.), Michael Kuchnik (Carnegie Mellon University), Mark Nelson (Red Hat Inc.), Gregory R. Ganger (Carnegie Mellon University), George Amvrosiadis (Carnegie Mellon University)

Ceph started equally enquiry projection inwards 2004 at UCSC. At the marrow of Ceph is a distributed object shop called RADOS. The storage backend was implemented over an already mature filesystem. The filesystem helps amongst block allocation, metadata management, together with crash recovery. Ceph squad built their storage backend on an existing filesystem, because they didn't desire to write a storage layer from scratch. A consummate filesystem takes a lot of fourth dimension (10 years) to develop, stabilize, optimize, together with mature.

However, having a filesystem inwards the path to the storage adds a lot of overhead. It creates problems for implementing efficient transactions. It  introduces bottlenecks for metadata operations. A filesystem directory amongst millions of pocket-size files volition live a metadata bottleneck forexample. Paging etc likewise creates problems. To circumvent these problems, Ceph squad tried hooking into FS internals yesteryear implementing WAL inwards userspace, together with usage the NewStore database to perform transactions. But it was difficult to wrestle amongst the filesystem. They had been patching problems for 7 years since 2010. Abutalib likens this equally the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, ..., together with acceptance!

Finally the Ceph squad deserted the filesystem approach together with started writing their ain storage organisation BlueStore which doesn't usage a filesystem. They were able to complete together with mature the storage degree inwards only 2 years! This is because a small, custom backend matures faster than a POSIX filesystem.

The novel storage layer, BlueStore, achieves a rattling high-performance compared to before versions. By avoiding information journaling, BlueStore is able to accomplish higher throughput than FileStore/XFS.

When using a filesystem the write-back of muddy meta/data interferes amongst WAL writes, together with causes high tail latency. In contrast, yesteryear controlling writes, together with using write-through policy, BlueStore ensures that no background writes to interfere amongst foreground writes. This fashion BlueStore avoids tail latency for writes.

Finally, having total command of I/O stack accelerates novel hardware adoption. For example, land filesystems own got difficult fourth dimension adapting to the shingled magnetic recording storage, the authors were able to add together metadata storage back upward to BlueStore for them, amongst information storage existence inwards the works.

To total up, the lesson learned was for distributed storage it was easier together with amend to implement a custom backend rather than trying to shoehorn a filesystem for this purpose.


Here is the architecture diagram of BlueStore, storage backend. All metadata is maintained inwards RocksDB, which layers on overstep of BlueFS, a minimal userspace filesystem.

Abutalib, the outset writer on the paper, did an fantabulous task presenting the paper. He is a lastly twelvemonth PhD amongst a lot of sense together with expertise on storage systems. He is on the task market.

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