Amazon Web Services provides an highly available hosting for our applications but are they prepared to run on more than one server? When you design a new application, you can follow best practices’ guides on AWS but if the application is inherited, it requires many modifications or to work with a POSIX shared storage as if it’s local. That’s where GlusterFS enters the game, beside adding flexibility to storage with horizontal growth opportunities in distributed mode, it has a replicated mode, which lets you replicate a volume (or a single folder in a file system) across multiple servers. Preliminary considerations Before realizing a proof of concept with two servers, in different availability zones, replicating an EBS volume with an ext4 filesystem, we will list the cases where GlusterFS should not be used: Sequential files written simultaneously from multiple servers such as logs. The locking system can lead to serious problems if you store … Continued

Gluster is a distributed filesystem that works well in the cloud. This post explains how to configure GlusterFS on an Ubuntu 12.04 image running in HP’s cloud.
Using this setup, I gain all the benefits of a distributed and replicated (redundant) filesy…