sambaXP 2024: SoS – Scale Out Samba, the comeback of Ceph
Talk by Ralph Böhme (SerNet / Samba Team)
Abstract:
This presentation explores scaling out Samba for high performance SMB file sharing in the age of cloud computing. Traditionally, Samba has relied on its own distributed database, CTDB, to maintain a coherent file server state. While CTDB has served well for many years, the demands of cloud environments require solutions with superior scalability, elasticity and manageability.
In previous presentations last year at SambaXP and SDC, we've looked at some of the existing scalable, high performance distributed databases such as Apache Cassandra, ScyllaDB, FoundationDB and others.
We had written a new backend for Samba's database access layer, "dbwrap", which allowed bridging into Python code to implement access to external databases. This allowed for rapid prototyping, testing and performance evaluation. The results of the performance comparison with the current ctdb implementation were very disappointing: it seemed that 15 years after the original invention of ctdb, there would still be no existing distributed database that could deliver the required performance.
In particular, Ceph's performance was abysmal, which was quite unexpected, but the reason for this was unknown. Can it do better? This presentation delves deeper to identify the root cause of these limitations, explores how to overcome them, and shares results from performance benchmarks.
Slides: https://sambaxp.org/fileadmin/user_up...
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