Torus: A distributed storage system by CoreOS

The CoreOS team is excited to make this initial release and start collaborating with folks that want to tackle distributed storage.

tl;dr this is a new OSS distributed storage project that is written in Go and backed by etcd for consistency. The first project built on top of Torus is a network block device that can be mounted into containers for persistent storage. It also includes integrations out of the box for Kubernetes "flex volumes". Get involved! :)

https://github.com/coreos/torus

I don't understand why this is being used over say librados + librbd from Ceph. This seems like an awful lot of work to get the same functionality that Gluster/Ceph already have. Is there something I'm missing here?

I kind of see this as a general trend where CoreOS is concerned they reimplement everything in house, even when open source solution might already exist - rkt, etcd, now this.

what is the existing alternative for storage in distributed container environments?

A few major things we wanted to accomplish:

Backed by etcd. Today etcd is a well tested and widely used consistent store with users like Kubernetes, Flannel (now Canal), Fleet, SkyDNS and many others. Building something like etcd requires tons of testing and etcd is becoming the solid go to for this category of distributed problems.

Easy to work on code base. Building an OSS community around a complex technology is really hard. It shouldn't be underestimated that a code base that can be built on OS X, Linux, and Windows will have an advantage in getting people involved and maturing the project.

Designed for other storage application. Torus is backed by a distributed storage interface that is exposed via gRPC (with the opportunity for language bindings in lots of languages). Our hope is to let people build write-ahead log systems, object systems, or filesystems on top of this abstraction.

Flexibility built into the storage layer. Over time we want people to implement different hash maps or explicit configuration of storage layout. This is an abstraction that we have today and intend to build out over time with feedback from users.

Happy to answer more questions. This is a young project and we look forward to working with people and hearing about what they want out of a storage system. Overall, we want to build something with folks that is easy to work on and backs itself with technologies that are getting good operational understanding in the "Cloud Native" space.