StorageOS aims to make container storage flexible by providing a single view of the underlying storage and exposing APIs for automation.
StorageOS is a virtualization layer that offers a unified view of a pool of available storage. This view is accessible as a volume. It itself runs as a container and has a Docker volume plugin for accessing the volume. The volume can also be accessed outside the container directly. The underlying storage can span many underlying containers running StorageOS. InfoQ got in touch with Alex Chircop, Founder and CTO at StorageOS, to learn more about the technology behind the solution. According to Chircop, StorageOS «can access different types of storage on the backend through a single layer. The virtualization engine currently supports physical and virtual disks. We are looking to add functionality to use object stores such as S3. »
A distributed storage system has to deal with fault-tolerance and latency. To achieve fault-tolerance, “the pool is protected through erasure coding and replicas. Erasure coding is used within a node to protect against disk failures and replicas are used across nodes to protect against node failures”, says Chircop.
The StorageOS volumes might span multiple hosts so they are created on the nodes where the container is instantiated to reduce latency. The software is designed to be optimized for Solid State Drives (SSDs), Chircop says, by using an SSD aware layout and reducing write amplification in the algorithms.
