Michael Adam is in search for "A stage for Samba in the era of the container platform!?" in his sambaXP 2020 talk. Adam is a Adam is a longtime Samba team member and works as Senior Manager Software Engineering at Red Hat (LinkedIn).
Abstract
In recent times, container application platforms, in particular kubernetes, have become extremely popular, have for instance overtaken the virtual machine centric cloud operating system OpenStack in popularity. In contrast to virtual machine environments which run a variety of operating systems and therefore also have natural use cases for Samba, container platforms are usually running one operating system (kernel) only, and thus don’t offer a very obvious space for Samba, whose main purpose is to act as an agent between different operating systems. Is there still a stage for Samba in container land?
This presentation starts with an introduction to the storage concepts of kubernetes and the container storage interface standard CSI, which generalizes these to other container platforms. It will explain the roles of file, block, and object storage in kubernetes and then shows how a distributed software defined storage system like ceph or gluster is brought into kubernetes, running alongside the consuming applications and managed by so called “operators”, providing storage self service for the applications.
From here on, the presentation explores some very interesting and possibly surprising opportunities for Samba in this environment. Details are omitted in this abstract in order to keep up the suspense. (Slides as PDF)
About the "sambaXP 2020 Retrospective"
In this series we will present recordings of the sambaXP 2020 in the coming weeks. The 19th edition of the international conference on the open source software Samba took place from 26 - 28 May 2020 for the first time exclusively in digital form. Due to the changed event format and the use of an online conference platform, organizer SerNet is able to offer all talks as videos for viewing (link).
