From the Gluster contributors’ side: what is Gluster?

Hello there, I recently started working on GlusterFS, realizing one of my long awaited dreams of working on a opensource product. This is my new blog for documenting things I learn during this journey.

If you are an elite guy, and somehow happened to come across my blog, do tell me if I could be doing things in a better way or if I am doing something totally wrong.(And in case you find my blog to be good, just a like is enough to keep me encouraged.)

For all the new explorers, join in and learn

I was part of the Linux User Group/FOSS group in my college. Our group was responsible for making students aware of the FOSS philosophy, making them comfortable with Linux/Unix tools etc. However, one thing that we were not able to accomplish was making that large community directly involved in a open source project. Something was stopping us, may be there was no one to tell us where to start. My primary audience for first few posts will be student community who want to contribute to open source but don’t know how.

Are you interested to know more?  I had this conversation with imaginary friend in my head which explains most of the things you would want to know.

Friend:	So what exactly is this GlusterFS that you are working on?
Me:	Make a guess
Friend:	Hmm, GNU + Cluster + FileSystem??
Me:	You are totally right about what the name describes! But there is more to it.
	Basically it is a scale-out Network attached storage.
	With current demands of data storage being so high, everyone wants a solution which is very flexible.
	GlusterFS is a software only solution which you can use with commodity hardware, either HDDs or SSDs and create a NAS in minutes.
	You want to increase storage space? Add few more HDDs or servers; it is as simple as that. That is the scale out part.
Friend:	So cluster in this context means cluster of servers?
Me:	Yes, you can have a few HDDs in one server and few others in another one and configure gluster to present both servers as a combined namespace.
	You can have a cluster of servers.
Friend:	Thats Cool !!
Me:	Hey remember that Gdrive project we did using FUSE? The one where we used Gmail’s space as a drive on our computer.
Friend:	Yes, I do! That was fun.
Me:	Gluster handles everything at the userspace. It uses traditional file systems underneath like xfs or ext3 and uses FUSE to present the file system to the user.
Friend:	Nice, so no kernel changes required?
Me:	Nope
Friend:	Hey , I want to give it a try. My 2 Roommates and I have a lot of movies stored on our laptops. We were thinking of organizing all of them this weekend. May be we can create a global namespace for all the three laptops combined using Gluster. Can you help me with installation if I run into any problem?
Me:	Awesome, sure , go ahead and try it out. Ping me if you have any trouble. You can read documentation at gluster.org.
	If I am not available , there is #gluster channel at irc.freenode.net to help you out too.
	Once you are done with installation, I would want you to contribute to the code too. I will help you with setting up git and tell you about the development process.
Friend:	Wow! That will be my first contribution to open source code. Will ping you by this weekend. Need to go now.
Me:	ok