OpenStack deployments are increasingly embracing distributed file storage solutions for virtual servers to provide fault-tolerance, mobility, and shared state between servers. The Ceph distributed file system (CephFS) has taken a leading role in providing this as a cache-coherent, horizontally scalable, and POSIX-compatible file store for OpenStack operators, leveraging Ceph's dominance and flexibility in OpenStack deployments where it already provides object and block storage solutions.

The OpenStack Shared File Systems service, Manila, provides a modular framework for securely exporting file shares to tenants in the cloud. In this session we will describe how Manila has been extended to support export of shares backed by CephFS via the NFS protocol to tenant VMs. We’ll discuss reasons for using NFS instead of or in addition to doing native CephFS exports and cover current and planned approaches to such issues as multi-tenancy, performance, and scale out of services.

This talk will be of immediate practical interest to cloud operators who have or are planning use Ceph clusters for object and block storage and want to use the same cluster for shared file services as well as to those more generally interested in Manila, distributed file systems, or Ceph evolution.

Patrick Donnelly

Patrick Donnelly is a software engineer at Red Hat, Inc. working as the project team lead for the Ceph distributed file system. In 2016 he completed his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Notre Dame with a dissertation on the topic of file transfer management in active storage cluster file systems. He has given talks at conferences including IEEE CCGrid, IEEE CloudCom, IEEE/ACM Supercomputing, and LinuxCon Vault.

Ramana Raja

Ramana Raja is an upstream contributor currently working on integrating CephFS with OpenStack Manila. He's been involved in the Manila project since the Juno release. Besides the OpenStack project, he's contributed to other popular open source projects such as Ceph and Gluster.

Victoria Martinez de la Cruz

Software engineer at Red Hat, FOSS passionate and tech in general enthusiast. Former Zaqar and Trove core reviewer. Currently working on Manila. OpenStack Outreachy and Google Summer of Code coordinator. Eager to learn about new technologies, to contribute to different open-source projects and to get new people involved with open-source philosophy.

Tom Barron

Tom leads the Red Hat OpenStack Platform Manila development team and is a leader and active core core team member in the upstream Manila development community. He started working on OpenStack Cinder during the Juno release and maintains a keen interest in cross-project initiatives. Today he focuses on hardening Manila as an enterprise quality orchestration and abstraction layer regardless of the storage back ends used, and on helping enable use of CephFS to provide a 100% open source distributed file system solution with Manila for open source clouds.