Announcing Gluster 4.0

The Gluster community celebrates 13 years of development with this latest release, Gluster 4.0. This release enables improved integration with containers, an enhanced user experience, and a next-generation management framework. The 4.0 release helps cloud-native app developers choose Gluster as the default scale-out distributed file system.

We’re highlighting some of the announcements and major features and changes here, but our release notes [1] have announcements, expanded major changes and features, issues and bugs addressed in this release.

Major enhancements:

1. Management
   GlusterD2 (GD2) is a new management daemon for Gluster-4.0. It is a complete rewrite, with all new internal core frameworks, that make it more scalable,
   easier to integrate with and has lower maintenance requirements. This replaces GlusterD.

A quick start guide [6] is available to get started with GD2.

Although GD2 is in tech preview for this release, it is ready to use for forming and managing new clusters.

2. Monitoring
   With this release, GlusterFS enables a lightweight method to access internal monitoring information.
3. Performance
   There are several enhancements to performance in the disperse translator and in the client side metadata caching layers.
4. Other enhancements of note
   This release adds: ability to run Gluster on FIPS compliant systems, ability to force permissions while creating files/directories, and improved consistency in distributed volumes.
5. Developer related
   New on-wire protocol version and full type encoding of internal dictionaries on the wire, Global translator to handle per-daemon options, improves translator registration functions, among a few other improvements, that help streamline development of newer translators.

Release packages are available at [2] and are signed with [3]. The upgrade guide for this release can be found at [4]

Related announcements:

1. As 3.13 was a short term maintenance release, it will reach end of life (EOL) with the release of 4.0.0 [5].
2. Releases that receive maintenance updates post 4.0 release are, 3.10, 3.12, 4.0 [5].
3. With this release, the CentOS storage SIG will not build server packages for CentOS6. Server packages will be available for CentOS7 only. For ease of migrations, client packages on CentOS6 will be published and maintained, as announced here [7].

References:
[1] Release notes: https://docs.gluster.org/en/latest/release-notes/4.0.0/
[2] Packages: https://download.gluster.org/pub/gluster/glusterfs/4.0/
[3] Packages signed with: https://download.gluster.org/pub/gluster/glusterfs/4.0/rsa.pub
[4] Upgrade guide: https://docs.gluster.org/en/latest/Upgrade-Guide/upgrade_to_4.0/
[5] Release schedule: https://www.gluster.org/release-schedule/
[6] GD2 quick start: https://github.com/gluster/glusterd2/blob/master/doc/quick-start-user-guide.md
[7] CentOs SIG CentOS6 support announcement: http://lists.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2018-January/033212.html