GlusterFS and Ceph volumes in Kubernetes

GlusterFS and Ceph are two distributed persistent storage systems. GlusterFS is at its core a network filesystem. Ceph is at the core an object store. Both expose block, object, and filesystem interfaces. Both use the xfs filesystem under the covers to store the data and metadata as xattr attributes. There are several reasons why you may want to use GlusterFs or Ceph as persistent volumes in your Kubernetes cluster:

• You may have a lot of data and applications that access the data in GlusterFS or Ceph

• You have administrative and operational expertise managing GlusterFS or Ceph

• You run in the cloud, but the limitations of the cloud platform persistent storage are a non-starter

Using GlusterFS

GlusterFS is intentionally simple, exposing the underlying directories as they are and leaving it to clients (or middleware) to handle high availability, replication, and distribution. Gluster organizes the data into logical volumes, which encompass multiple nodes ...