Quota Project: An effective way to manage the usage of your Swift-based storage cloud

Quota Project: An effective way to manage the usage of your Swift-based storage cloud

During the OpenStack Folsom Design Summit in April 2012, there was an interesting workshop discussion on Swift Quota. This topic has been actively and formally discussed in many forums (Link1, Link2) and also regarded as one of the blueprints in OpenStack Swift. Here are some of our key takeaways and insights on what this means for your storage cloud.

Swift Quota: Business Values

The business value of implementing Swift Quota is two-fold:

(1) Protect the Cluster: Cloud operators can conveniently set some effective limits, (e.g. limit on the number of objects per container), to protect the Swift cluster from many malicious behaviors, for example, creating millions of 0-byte objects to slow down the container database, or creating thousands of empty containers to overload the account database.

(2) Manage Storage Capacity: Cloud storage providers can sell their cloud storage capacity upfront, which is similar to the Amazon EC2 reserved instance price model: the provider can sell a fixed amount of storage capacity (e.g., 1TB) to a customer by setting up a capacity limit for that customer and would not be concerned with how the customer uses the storage capacity (e.g., use 100% capacity all the time, or use 50% capacity today and 95% capacity next month). The vendor will simply charge the customer based on the fixed amount of storage capacity (and possibly other resource usages, such as the number of PUT, GET and DELETE operations) and would not have to precisely track and calculate how much storage capacity is used by a customer on an on-going basis.

In summary, the reason Swift Quota is interesting to the cloud storage operators and providers is that it enables effective and robust resource (e.g. capacity) management and improves the overall usability of the Swift-based storage cloud.

Today, we would like to introduce an interesting Swift Quota project that we have been focusing on and which has been used in StackLab – a production public cloud for users to try out OpenStack for free. (Details about StackLab can be found athttp://freedomhui.com/stacklab/

Swift Quota Introduction

Swift Quota is a production-ready project that is mainly used for controlling the usage of account and containers in OpenStack Swift. In the current version of Swift Quota, the users can set up the quotas on the following three items:

(1) Number of containers per account (example: an account cannot have more than 5 containers)

(2) Number of objects per container (example: a container cannot have more than 100 objects)

(3) Storage capacity per container (example: the size of a container cannot be larger than 100 GB)

Swift Quota is implemented as the middle layer in Swift, so it is simple and straightforward to integrate and merge with the mainstream Swift code. The idea of Swift Quota is not to create new separate counters to keep track of the resources usages, but to utilize the existing metadata associated with the containers and accounts. So it is very lightweight in the production environment.

Swift Quota Installation

Before we go any further, we’d like to thank AlexYuYang for his contribution to this project. The project is available at Alex’s github repository.

To install Swift Quota, you either check out the modified Swift code from the github repository above (git clone git://github.com/AlexYangYu/StackLab-swift.git) and switch to the branch called “dev-quota” (git checkout dev-quota). Then you install the modified Swift software on the cluster nodes, or you need to follow the commit history to figure out which changes are new and then merge them to your existing Swift code base.

Configuration File

To enable Swift Quota, /etc/swift/proxy-server.conf should be adjusted as following (bold words/lines highlight the new configuration settings),

[pipeline:main]
pipeline = catch_errors cache token auth quota proxy-server

[filter:quota]
use = egg:swift#quota
cache_timeout = 30
# If set precise_mode = true, the quota middleware will disable the cache.
precise_mode = true
set log_name = quota
quota = {
“container_count”: {
“default”: 5,
“L1″: 10,
“L2″: 25
},
“object_count”: {
“default”: 200000,
“L1″: 500000,
“L2″: 1000000
},
“container_usage”: {
“default”: 2147483648,
“L1″: 10737418240,
“L2″: 53687091200
}
}

From the above configuration settings, for each of the three resource quotas, there are 3 levels of limits: default, L1 and L2. Here, we want to provide a flexible and configurable interface for the cloud operator (e.g., reseller_admin) to specify quota level for each account. For example, the cloud operator can assign “L1” level quota to one account and “L2” level quota to a different account. If the quota level is not clearly specified, all accounts will strictly follow the “default” quota level. Cloud operators are free to define as many quota levels as they want for their own use cases. Next, we will show how to specify the quota level for an account.

Assigning Quota Level to an Account

We assume only the reseller_admin can modify the quota level for an account, so make sure you have a reseller_admin login in your authentication system. For example,

[filter:tempauth]
use = egg:swift#tempauth
user_system_root = testpass .admin http://your_swift_ip:8080/v1/AUTH_system
user_reseller_reseller = reseller .reseller_admin http:// your_swift_ip:8080/v1/AUTH_reseller

Then, we use this curl command to retrieve the X-Auth-Token of the reseller_admin

curl -k -v -H ‘X-Storage-User: reseller:reseller’ -H ‘X-Storage-Pass: reseller’ http://your_swift_ip:8080/auth/v1.0

Next, we use this curl command to edit the quota level of an account, called “system”. For example,

curl -v -X POST http://your_swift_ip:8080/v1/AUTH_system -H ‘X-Auth-Token: your reseller_admin token’ -H ‘X-Account-Meta-Quota: L1′

Note that, in the above curl command, ‘X-Account-Meta-Quota: L1′ is to assign L1 level quota to the account called “system”

Similarly, the following curl command will update the quota level to L2

curl -v -X POST http://your_swift_ip:8080/v1/AUTH_system -H ‘X-Auth-Token: your reseller_admin token’ -H ‘X-Account-Meta-Quota: L2′

If everything works correctly, you will receive a “204 No Content” response from the server after you issue the above curl commands.

Trade-off between Cluster Performance and Quota Accuracy

It is possible to trigger a quota check upon each PUT request to guarantee that no quota violation is allowed. However, when hardware resources are in short supply and the workload becomes very intensive, the check upon each PUT request may affect the Swift cluster performance. So, in the current design of Swift Quota, there are two parameters, called precise_mode and cache_time under [filter:quota] in /etc/swift/proxy-server.conf, that can effectively balance the cluster performance and quota accuracy.

When precise_mode is set to true, cache_time is not effective and the Swift cluster will check the quota upon each PUT request by reading the current container and account usage from the server. However, when precise_mode is set to false, the Swift cluster will only read the container and account usage that is cached in the memory. cache_time will then decide how often the cached information is updated via reading it from the server.

Closing Comments

We are happy to see that the Swift Quota has been in production in StackLab environment for almost 6 months and we believe Swift Quota is a neat and clear design that will be adopted by more Swift users.

If you are thinking of putting together a storage cloud, or thinking of introducing Quota to your Swift cluster, we would love to discuss your challenges and share our observations. Please drop us a note at swift@zmanda.com.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 31st, 2013 at 6:52 pm and is filed under Ning Zhang, Open Source,OpenStack Swift. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.