OpenEBS Community SyncUp Meeting Minutes
===

###### tags: `Templates` `Meeting`

:::info
- **Location:** Bevy Virtual
- **Date:** Bi-weekly on Wednesday 3:30 PM UTC (Apr 12, 2023 onwards)
- **Agenda**
1. Status updates on current and upcoming releases
2. Discussion topics
:::
## Aug 30, 2023
### Attendees
Hrudaya Ranjan Sahoo, Niladri Halder, Vishnu Attur
### Minutes
- Meeting's canceled due to low participation

## Aug 16, 2023
### Attendees
Simone Croom (Microsoft), Harsh Vardhan (Thoughtworks), Hrudaya Ranjan Sahoo, Tiago Castro, Diwakar Sharma, Abhinandan Purkait, Vishnu Attur
### Minutes
#### Updates
- The 2.3.0 release of Mayastor has been released alongwith OpenEBS 3.8. With this version, a user can now take a snapshot of the Mayastor PVC.
- Upcoming release i.e 2.4.0 will be having support for creating a volume from a snapshot and eventing.
- Simon spoke about the possible contributions from Microsoft - pool capacity field in the CR for pool expansion and interrupt-mode support in SPDK.
- It's being considered to use Google Meet as the alternative for the current virtual meeting platform, as Google Meet is a widely adopted and known collaboration platform.

## Aug 02, 2023
### Attendees
Dennis Maisenbacher (WD), Hrudaya Ranjan Sahoo, Tiago Castro, Blaise Dias, Vishnu Attur
### Minutes
#### Updates
- The 2.3.0 release of Mayastor has been released alongwith OpenEBS 3.8. With this version, a user can now take a snapshot of the Mayastor PVC.
- Upcoming release i.e 2.4.0 will be having support for creating a volume from a snapshot.
#### NVMe zoning
- Dennis asked if the team can start reviewing his PR on Mayastor repo.
- In order for the PR to be complete, there is a certain functionality that needs to be added. Dennis is in touch with Anand (Microsoft) for getting this done.

## Jul 19, 2023
### Attendees
Dennis Maisenbacher (WD), Hrudaya Ranjan Sahoo, Diwakar Sharma, Abhinandan Purkait, Tiago Castro, Simon Croome, Vishnu Attur
### Minutes
#### Updates
- The 2.3.0 release of Mayastor got delayed and is expected in this week.
- Highlights of the release are snapshot support on single-replica volumes, rebuild history fixes and stability fixes.
#### NVMe zoning
- Dennis gave an insightful demo on the Mayastor-specific changes to support the zoned SSDs.

## Jul 05, 2023
### Attendees
Dennis Maisenbacher (WD), Blaise Dias, Hrudaya Ranjan Sahoo, Diwakar Sharma, Vandana Varakantham, Vishnu Attur
### Minutes
#### Updates
- The 2.3.0 release of Mayastor is expected in this week.
- Highlights of the release are snapshot support on single-replica volumes, rebuild history fixes and stability fixes.
#### NVMe zoning
- Dennis updated on the Mayastor support for zoned SSDs.
- The support on zoned SSDs is being built on other relevant open-source projects like Longhorn and Ceph(?).
- Dennis will provide a demo on the Mayastor-specific changes during the next edition of the meeting.

## Apr 26, 2023
### Attendees
Simon Croome, Blaise Dias, Tiago Castro, Hrudaya Ranjan Sahoo, Diwakar Sharma, Niladri Halder, Vishnu Attur
### Minutes
#### Updates
- The 2.1.0 release of Mayastor is expected in this week.
- Highlights of the release are thin-provisioning support, seamless upgrades from prior 2.0 versions and migration path from 1.x versions.
#### Microsoft
- Simon provided insights on the testing pipelines (Azure devops) in Microsoft for Mayastor.
- Golang-based, the focus is on performance, scalability and provisioning speeds.
- Th generic tests could be contributed back to Mayastor test repository. This opened up questions about open-sourcing the current Mayastor e2e.
- Asked him about the plan to move to 2.0 codebase, he said it's targeted in the next quarter. Pushing changes (XFS support) to upstream is based on this.
- Pool-tiering changes can still be upstreamed in the current form. He said he will try to get this done sooner.

## Apr 12, 2023
### Attendees
Felix Xavier, Tiago Castro, Hrudaya Ranjan Sahoo, Diwakar Sharma, Vishnu Attur
### Minutes
#### Updates
- All attendees are from Datacore.
- Communicated the progress on the 2.1.0 release.

## Mar 29, 2023
### Attendees
Dennis Maisenbacher (WD), Simon Croome (MS), Anand Subramanian (MS), Tim Laibacher, Abhishek Agrawal, Tiago Castro, Hrudaya Ranjan Sahoo, Vishnu Attur
### Minutes
#### Updates
- Update on 2.0.1 release - Released on Mar 14, 2023, contains diskPool operator reconciliation fixes, IO-engine crash fix, possible data-corruption due to pool device mis-configuration.
- What's coming in the 2.1 release - Expected in Apr, 2023, support for thin provisioning and non-disruptive upgrade.
- Communication on the modified timings for the community meetings from next instance i.e. April 12, 2023 onwards.
- New timing: 3:30 pm UTC to 4:15 pm UTC. Cadence is retained as bi-weekly Wednesdays.
#### Microsoft proposal: support for XFS backend
- Online pool resize (expansion) and online volume resize (expansion) have been re-confirmed as the main requirements that SPDK currently may not be supporting, hence the proposal to use XFS.
- Simon informed that MS is not looking to use Mayastor replication, since Azure volume is already replicated. Since this can lead to data unavailability in case of node or network failures, MS would want to detect the condition and attach the Azure volume to a healthy node (after detaching from the failed node). This brought up a requirement on the Mayastor to 'detect' pool from a migrated device.
- Simon enquired about [NDM](https://github.com/openebs/node-disk-manager)-like support for Mayastor for management of devices at scale.
- Anand spoke about a possible data inconsistency issue during replica retirement status update in etcd. Team will be investigating the scenario.
#### Zoned NVMe support
- Dennis has been running benchmarking tests, he will share the results and discuss on how to take the zoned NVMe support proposal forward, in the upcoming meetings.

## Mar 15, 2023
### Attendees
Dennis Maisenbacher (WD), Simon Croome (MS), Dave Brace, Felix Xavier, Tiago Castro, Diwakar Sharma, Niladri Halder, Vishnu Attur
### Minutes
#### Release Updates
- Update on 2.0.1 release - Released on Mar 14, 2023, contains diskPool operator reconciliation fixes, IO-engine crash fix, possible data-corruption due to pool device mis-configuration.
- What's coming in the 2.1 release - Expected in Apr, 2023, support for thin provisioning and non-disruptive upgrade.
- Dennis mentioned he's observed the IO-engine crash/restart issue during his benchmarking testing of 2.0.0, asked him to share the logs bundle to check if it's the same issue that got fixed in 2.0.1.
#### Microsoft proposal: support for XFS backend
- Simon gave an overview of the reasons why MS would like to have XFS as Mayastor pooling.
- SPDK doesn't have support for online pool resize on same underlying device and is not expected in the near-term roadmap of SPDK. Azure volumes can expand upto 64 TB, and the overlaying pool needs to resize accordingly without I/O disruption.
- XFS has support for online resize and XFS performance is comparable to SPDK's blobstor/lvol.
- Datacore team suggested that XFS integration can be achieved if there is a pluggable backend architecture for the pooling layer - spdk, xfs, btrfs, etc.
- MS has been working on a PoC on top of Mayastor 1.x code base, with LVM PR as the reference.
- More detailed discussions are expected to happen in the upcoming meetings.
- Simon also shared insights on how container-native storage solutions like Mayastor fit in a cloud provider environment which provide persistent storage like EBS, Azure disks, GPD.
- In all these providers, storage exists outside the Kubernetes cluster where provisioning/management of volumes can be complex and time-consuming as the control-plane commands involve API invocations at hypervisor, VM and storage stack.
- In contrast, in Kubernetes-native storage solution like Mayastor, volume provisioning/management can be completely off-loaded to the Mayastor control-plane. This is quick and efficient without compromising on storage performance. Cloud volumes will form the backend devices for Mayastor pools.
#### Zoned NVMe support
- Dennis has been running benchmarking tests, he may share the results and discuss on how to take the zoned NVMe support proposal forward, in the upcoming meetings.