Call for participation: F4 Asynchronous Storage
Cowan, William G
Hello All,
As you may know, Andrew Woods started a conversation last May [0] soliciting feedback for post-4.2.0 Fedora feature development. From that, it was determined that the top 3 potential features for community development should be focused on WebAccessControl, Asynchronous Storage, and Transparent Filesystems. Work in the past month has already produced a positive start towards WebAccessControl, and the development teams at DuraSpace, Indiana University, and Amherst College would like to bring Asynchronous Storage into focus, starting with a broader call for participation.
This feature is envisioned to focus on two different aspects related to storage interactions. On the back-end it would allow Fedora to communicate asynchronously with high-latency systems, including hierarchical storage management systems and cloud storage. On the front-end the Fedora REST-API would be updated to expose client interactions to help mediate asynchronous access to high-latency storage systems.
Actions taken to date include a rough sketch design by David Wilcox and Andrew Woods [1], and a recent conference call including the DuraSpace team, Indiana University, and Amherst College [2]. Given that the topics of pluggable and/or high-latency storage types have been discussed in various forms over a longer time period than the recent calls for feedback, we believe that interest in this area of development is potentially broader than the current representation. Given that its applicability is probably fairly high, the implementation probably demands careful guidance from the Fedora community from a design perspective, and hopefully others will wish to contribute development resources towards the effort as well.
Specific actions from the initial conference call include initiating this call for participation, and to begin thinking about whether or not the design should include the use of the API Extension Architecture work also currently in progress. Next steps would be a simple response from the community to this thread to help gauge interest, followed by additional conference calls as needed. While this message has been posted to multiple lists, please direct your responses to fedora-c...@googlegroups.com.
Regards,
[0] https://groups.google.com/d/topic/fedora-tech/9IrRXC2k5ZI/discussion
[1] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/Design+-+Asynchronous+and+Pluggable+Storage
[2] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/2015-08-17+-+Indiana+-+Amherst+F4+Storage