Design space of distributed file systems

Warning: This is work in progress, so this post will be updated
TODO: Make a table of the file systems mentioned e.g. in CRUSH paper (related work section).

Design space

A subset of properties that can considered when designing a new distributed file system:

  • Is the cluster static or dynamic?
  • Is the cluster heterogenous or homogenous?
  • Object based or block based?
  • Is data ever migrated once it is written? If so under which circumstances (storage added and/or storage deleted)?
  • Is the allocation based on metadata or a mapping function (consistent hashing etc)?
  • Is there a central allocator?
  • Is there replication? Across failure domains?
  • What are the assumptions about the workload (skew on new/old items etc)?

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