The complexity and scale of today’s cloud storage systems is growing fast. In response to these challenges, Software- Defined Storage (SDS) has recently become a prime candidate to simplify storage management in the cloud. This article presents IOStack: The first SDS architecture for object stores (OpenStack Swift). At the control plane, the provisioning of SDS services to tenants is made according to a set of policies managed via a high-level DSL. Policies may target storage automation and/or specific SLA objectives. At the data plane, policies define the enforcement of SDS services, namely filters, on a tenant’s requests. Moreover, IOStack is a framework to build a variety of filters, ranging from general-purpose computations close to the data to specialized data management mechanisms. Our experiments illustrate that IOStack enables easy and effective policy-based provisioning, which can significantly improve the operation of a multi-tenant object store.

This work has been funded by the European Union through project H2020 “IOStack: Software-Defined Storage for Big Data” (644182) and by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through project “Servicios Cloud y Redes Comunitarias” (TIN-2013-47245-C2-2-R).

Peer Reviewed