Fwd: Deprecation of intree GlusterFS driver in 1.25

[Humble Chirammal]

+ dev ML

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Humble Chirammal <hchi...@redhat.com>
Date: Thu, Jul 28, 2022 at 6:13 PM
Subject: Deprecation of intree GlusterFS driver in 1.25
To: kubernetes-sig-storage <kubernetes-...@googlegroups.com>, <kuberne...@googlegroups.com>

Hey Team,

As we all know, there is an effort in the kubernetes community to remove in-tree storage plugins to reduce external dependencies and security concerns in the core Kubernetes. CSI plugin has been the dominant and proper way to go. Thus, we are in a process to gradually deprecate all the in-tree external storage plugins and eventually remove them from the core Kubernetes codebase.  

We would like to bring into your notice that, we are planning to deprecate GlusterFS intree plugin in 1.25 release and planning to take out Heketi code from Kubernetes Code base in subsequent release. This code removal will not be following our normal deprecation policy [1] and will be treated as an exception [2]. The main reason for this exception is that, Heketi is in "Deep Maintenance" [3], also please see [4] for the latest push back from the Heketi team on changes we would need to keep vendoring heketi into kubernetes/kubernetes. We cannot keep heketi in our code base as heketi itself is literally going away.

Unfortunately there is no maintained Gluster CSI driver which we could rely on or build upon the (online) CSI migration or translation path [5].

Here we are proposing immediate deprecation and removal of heketi from our code base by invoking the exception clause. Preferably deprecation in 1.25 and removal in 1.26. However we would like to get your feedback on this plan and would like to consider/revisit the removal version accordingly.

If you are using GlusterFS driver in your cluster setup, please reply with  below info before 16-Aug-2022 which can help us to make a decision on when to completely remove this code base from the repo.

- what version of kubernetes you are running in your setup ?
- how often do you upgrade your cluster?
- what vendor or distro you are using ? Is it any (downstream) product offering or upstream GlusterFS driver directly used in your setup?

Awaiting your feedback.

Thanks,
Humble

[1] https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/using-api/deprecation-policy/
[2] https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/using-api/deprecation-policy/#exceptions
[3] https://github.com/heketi/heketi#maintenance-status
[4] https://github.com/heketi/heketi/pull/1904#issuecomment-1197100513
[5] https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/100897