openstack team mailing list archive

[Clint Byrum <clint@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Excerpts from Heiko Krämer's message of 2013-07-05 09:24:03 -0700:
> Heyho guys,
> 
> I'm searching for a solution to share storage over more then one instance.
> 
> Normally you attach a block device with cinder directly via iscsi or 
> glusterfs or whatever to one instance and that's it. Multi attachments 
> are not present.
> 
> 
> Use case:
> 
> I've an application on 4 application instances and a database instance. 
> Now you have static file like images, movies, css ... but this files 
> should be available on each application instance.

This use case is best served by object storage like swift and CEPH's radosgw.

> Now you need to fire up an "storage" instance and attach a volume. After 
> that you can with nfs or what ever share your stuff to the application 
> instances but i think this is a very big ressource overhead for small 
> projects. You need a instance only to share your data on each project 
> and this n times :(
> 

If you only have one small app with 5 instances, running your own
OpenStack is quite overkill.  However, I suspect you have OpenStack so
you can have many small apps with a few instances, and thus you'll find
many of them can benefit from a good solid object store.