openstack-manuals/doc/common/section_objectstorage-components.xml

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  xml:id="section_objectstorage-components">
    <title>Components</title>
        <para>The components that enable Object Storage to deliver high availability, high
        durability, and high concurrency are:</para>
        <itemizedlist>
            <listitem>
                <para><emphasis role="bold">Proxy servers.</emphasis> Handle all of the incoming
                API requests.</para>
            </listitem>
            <listitem>
                <para><emphasis role="bold">Rings.</emphasis> Map logical names of data to
                locations on particular disks.</para>
            </listitem>
            <listitem>
                <para><emphasis role="bold">Zones.</emphasis> Isolate data from other zones. A
                failure in one zone doesn't impact the rest of the cluster because data is
                replicated across zones.</para>
            </listitem>
            <listitem>
                <para><emphasis role="bold">Accounts and containers.</emphasis> Each account and
                container are individual databases that are distributed across the cluster. An
                account database contains the list of containers in that account. A container
                database contains the list of objects in that container.</para>
            </listitem>
            <listitem>
                <para><emphasis role="bold">Objects.</emphasis> The data itself.</para>
            </listitem>
            <listitem>
                <para><emphasis role="bold">Partitions.</emphasis> A partition stores objects,
                account databases, and container databases and helps manage locations where data
                lives in the cluster.</para>
            </listitem>
        </itemizedlist>
    <figure>
        <title>Object Storage building blocks</title>
        <mediaobject>
            <imageobject>
                <imagedata fileref="../common/figures/objectstorage-buildingblocks.png"/>
            </imageobject>
        </mediaobject>
    </figure>
    <section xml:id="section_proxy-servers">
        <title>Proxy servers</title>
        <para>Proxy servers are the public face of Object Storage and handle all of the incoming API
            requests. Once a proxy server receives a request, it determines the storage node based
            on the object's URL, for example, https://swift.example.com/v1/account/container/object.
            Proxy servers also coordinate responses, handle failures, and coordinate
            timestamps.</para>
        <para>Proxy servers use a shared-nothing architecture and can be scaled as needed based on
            projected workloads. A minimum of two proxy servers should be deployed for redundancy.
            If one proxy server fails, the others take over.</para>
        <para>For more information concerning proxy server configuration, please see the
 <link xlink:href="http://docs.openstack.org/trunk/config-reference/content/proxy-server-configuration.html">Configuration Reference</link>.
        </para>
    </section>
    <section xml:id="section_ring">
    <title>Rings</title>
    <para>A ring represents a mapping between the names of entities stored on disk and their
            physical locations. There are separate rings for accounts, containers, and objects. When
            other components need to perform any operation on an object, container, or account, they
            need to interact with the appropriate ring to determine their location in the
            cluster.</para>
    <para>The ring maintains this mapping using zones, devices, partitions, and replicas. Each
            partition in the ring is replicated, by default, three times across the cluster, and
            partition locations are stored in the mapping maintained by the ring. The ring is also
            responsible for determining which devices are used for handoff in failure
            scenarios.</para>
        <para>Data can be isolated into zones in the ring. Each partition replica is guaranteed to
            reside in a different zone. A zone could represent a drive, a server, a cabinet, a
            switch, or even a data center.</para>
        <para>The partitions of the ring are equally divided among all of the devices in the Object
            Storage installation. When partitions need to be moved around (for example, if a device
            is added to the cluster), the ring ensures that a minimum number of partitions are moved
            at a time, and only one replica of a partition is moved at a time.</para>
        <para>You can use weights to balance the distribution of partitions on drives across the
            cluster. This can be useful, for example, when differently sized drives are used in a
            cluster.</para>
        <para>The ring is used by the proxy server and several background processes (like
            replication).</para>
    <figure>
        <title>The <emphasis role="bold">ring</emphasis></title>
        <mediaobject>
            <imageobject>
                <imagedata fileref="../common/figures/objectstorage-ring.png"/>
            </imageobject>
        </mediaobject>
    </figure>
        <para>These rings are externally managed, in that the server processes themselves do not
            modify the rings, they are instead given new rings modified by other tools.</para>
        <para>The ring uses a configurable number of bits from an
           MD5 hash for a path as a partition index that designates a
            device. The number of bits kept from the hash is known as
            the partition power, and 2 to the partition power
            indicates the partition count. Partitioning the full MD5
            hash ring allows other parts of the cluster to work in
            batches of items at once which ends up either more
            efficient or at least less complex than working with each
            item separately or the entire cluster all at once.</para>
        <para>Another configurable value is the replica count, which indicates how many of the
            partition-device assignments make up a single ring. For a given partition number, each
            replica's device will not be in the same zone as any other replica's device. Zones can
            be used to group devices based on physical locations, power separations, network
            separations, or any other attribute that would improve the availability of multiple
            replicas at the same time.</para>
    </section>
<section xml:id="section_zones">
        <title>Zones</title>
            <para>Object Storage allows configuring zones in order to isolate failure boundaries.
            Each data replica resides in a separate zone, if possible. At the smallest level, a zone
            could be a single drive or a grouping of a few drives. If there were five object storage
            servers, then each server would represent its own zone. Larger deployments would have an
            entire rack (or multiple racks) of object servers, each representing a zone. The goal of
            zones is to allow the cluster to tolerate significant outages of storage servers without
            losing all replicas of the data.</para>
            <para>As mentioned earlier, everything in Object Storage is stored, by default, three
            times. Swift will place each replica "as-uniquely-as-possible" to ensure both high
            availability and high durability. This means that when choosing a replica location,
            Object Storage chooses a server in an unused zone before an unused server in a zone that
            already has a replica of the data.</para>
    <figure>
        <title>Zones</title>
        <mediaobject>
            <imageobject>
                <imagedata fileref="../common/figures/objectstorage-zones.png"/>
            </imageobject>
        </mediaobject>
    </figure>
            <para>When a disk fails, replica data is automatically distributed to the other zones to
            ensure there are three copies of the data.</para>
    </section>
    <section xml:id="section_accounts-containers">
            <title>Accounts and containers</title>
            <para>Each account and container is an individual SQLite
                database that is distributed across the cluster. An
                account database contains the list of containers in
                that account. A container database contains the list
                of objects in that container.</para>
    <figure>
        <title>Accounts and containers</title>
        <mediaobject>
            <imageobject>
                <imagedata fileref="../common/figures/objectstorage-accountscontainers.png"/>
            </imageobject>
        </mediaobject>
    </figure>
            <para>To keep track of object data locations, each account in the system has a database
            that references all of its containers, and each container database references each
            object.</para>
    </section>
    <section xml:id="section_partitions">
            <title>Partitions</title>
            <para>A partition is a collection of stored data, including account databases, container
            databases, and objects. Partitions are core to the replication system.</para>
            <para>Think of a partition as a bin moving throughout a fulfillment center warehouse.
            Individual orders get thrown into the bin. The system treats that bin as a cohesive
            entity as it moves throughout the system. A bin is easier to deal with than many little
            things. It makes for fewer moving parts throughout the system.</para>
            <para>System replicators and object uploads/downloads operate on partitions. As the
            system scales up, its behavior continues to be predictable because the number of
            partitions is a fixed number.</para>
            <para>Implementing a partition is conceptually simple, a partition is just a
            directory sitting on a disk with a corresponding hash table of what it contains.</para>
    <figure>
        <title>Partitions</title>
        <mediaobject>
            <imageobject>
                <imagedata fileref="../common/figures/objectstorage-partitions.png"/>
            </imageobject>
        </mediaobject>
    </figure>
    </section>
    <section xml:id="section_replicators">
            <title>Replicators</title>
        <para>In order to ensure that there are three copies of the data everywhere, replicators
            continuously examine each partition. For each local partition, the replicator compares
            it against the replicated copies in the other zones to see if there are any
            differences.</para>
            <para>The replicator knows if replication needs to take place by examining hashes. A hash
            file is created for each partition, which contains hashes of each directory in the
            partition. Each of the three hash files is compared. For a given partition, the hash
            files for each of the partition's copies are compared. If the hashes are different, then
            it is time to replicate, and the directory that needs to be replicated is copied
            over.</para>
            <para>This is where partitions come in handy. With fewer things in the system, larger
            chunks of data are transferred around (rather than lots of little TCP connections, which
            is inefficient) and there is a consistent number of hashes to compare.</para>
            <para>The cluster eventually has a consistent behavior where the newest data has a
            priority.</para>
    <figure>
        <title>Replication</title>
        <mediaobject>
            <imageobject>
                <imagedata fileref="../common/figures/objectstorage-replication.png"/>
            </imageobject>
        </mediaobject>
    </figure>
            <para>If a zone goes down, one of the nodes containing a replica notices and proactively
            copies data to a handoff location.</para>
    </section>
    <section xml:id="section_usecases">
    <title>Use cases</title>
        <para>The following sections show use cases for object uploads and downloads and introduce the components.</para>
        <section xml:id="upload">
    <title>Upload</title>
        <para>A client uses the REST API to make a HTTP request to PUT an object into an existing
                container. The cluster receives the request. First, the system must figure out where
                the data is going to go. To do this, the account name, container name, and object
                name are all used to determine the partition where this object should live.</para>
        <para>Then a lookup in the ring figures out which storage nodes contain the partitions in
                question.</para>
        <para>The data is then sent to each storage node where it is placed in the appropriate
                partition. At least two of the three writes must be successful before the client is
                notified that the upload was successful.</para>
        <para>Next, the container database is updated asynchronously to reflect that there is a new
                object in it.</para>
    <figure>
        <title>Object Storage in use</title>
        <mediaobject>
            <imageobject>
                <imagedata fileref="../common/figures/objectstorage-usecase.png"/>
            </imageobject>
        </mediaobject>
    </figure>
        </section>
    <section xml:id="section_swift-component-download">
    <title>Download</title>
        <para>A request comes in for an account/container/object. Using the same consistent hashing,
                the partition name is generated. A lookup in the ring reveals which storage nodes
                contain that partition. A request is made to one of the storage nodes to fetch the
                object and, if that fails, requests are made to the other nodes.</para>
        </section>
</section>
</section>