fsdfs was originally developed at Jamendo.com to manage the distribution of millions of MP3/OGG files at very low cost on commodity servers.
fsdfs aims to :
- make a single virtual filesystem accessible from several servers
- be fully distributed (no single point of failure)
- automatically manage sharding/replication : files spread themselves among servers efficiently
- make adding new servers a no-brainer : checkout code, set swarm password, ./fsdfsd.py and enjoy watching files replicate in :)
- try to fill up its allowed disk quota to maximize redundancy
- be extensible via simple python code
- allow userland variables (like popularity) to boost a file's replication/redundancy level
- sit on top of any POSIX filesystem
- have APIs to see on which servers a file is replicated, to be able to distribute client requests efficiently
For simplicity, fsdfs 1.0 will have a master/slaves design (slaves being readable even if the master is down).
fsdfs 2.0 will remove the need of a master server, possibly using a DHT network like Kademlia. Code for 1.0 will already be structured to make its implementation easy.
Each file has two important variables :
- Its ideal replication count N. (N=3 by default, can be customized per-file by a user-defined python function)
- Its current replication count K
The master has a list of all the servers with their status, which includes :
- cpu/network load
- list of all the files replicated on the server
- free disk quota
The free disk quota will always tend to zero because each server tries to replicate as many files as it can. Hence, max(K-N) is a more interesting number for a server, because it measures the extent of "over-replication". If max(K-N)>0, some copies on the server are not strictly necessary and could be deleted. If max(K-N)<=0, every copy is needed and the server should be considered "full".
The primary job of the master is to manage file replication, making sure target replications counts are met or exceeded. In other words, it has to make min(K-N) accross all known files as high as it can.
The algorithm used is very simple :
- select the file having min(K-N)
- choose a server :
- not already having a copy of this file
- not too loaded
- with enough free disk
- if no servers have space, pick the server with the file having max(K-N), delete this file, GOTO 2
- Have the file copied to this server (=> K++)
- GOTO 1
min(K-N) across all files is a good measure of the health and general disk usage of the filesystem. min(K-N) should be positive, ideally greater than 1 (in which case all the files would have one more copy than the target replication count)
min(K-N) will naturally decrease when adding new files. min(K-N) becoming <1 or negative should be the signal that new servers are needed.
just run:
python tests/basic.py python tests/quota.py python tests/persist.py
There are no packages yet, just clone our github repo!
If you'd like to help out, you can fork the project at http://github.com/sylvinus/fsdfs and report any bugs at http://github.com/sylvinus/fsdfs/issues.
After looking at many open source projects like GlusterFS, XtreemFS, Tahoe, ... we found that they were extremely powerful, but equally complicated to deploy. Most of them were also not supporting easy configuration of the replication for each file. We found none that had explicitly the strategy to fill up each server with as many files as possible.
The project closest to the design we wanted was MogileFS, but we didn't want to hack Perl code. So here we go! :)
