I’m glad to see the strong alignment between Rex-Ray and CSI.

Would it make sense for Rex-Ray to be even more closely aligned with CSI, i.e. as a set of libraries and tools for people wanting to build CSI implementations. For example, CSI has a placeholder repo (see https://github.com/container-storage-interface/libraries) for libraries and tools. Similar to the Kubernetes incubator repo. Could RexRay become part of that or does it need to be its own top-level project?

I worry about confusing developers and end-users with another CNCF project that attempt to achieve the same goal — CSI.

On Mar 1, 2018, at 8:48 AM, alexis richardson <alexis@...> wrote:

All - questions?

(thanks Clint, this is super helpful)


On Tue, Feb 20, 2018 at 6:00 PM, Kitson, Clinton
<clinton.kitson@...> wrote:

Correct Brian, REX-Ray should be transparent to end users in this space and
provides an important service by helping connect apps to storage. Operators
of clusters are the ones that should be very aware of it as it would provide
trusted and more quality plugins that are built on top of the existing CSI
spec.

REX-Ray stats: Recently REX-Ray went through some refactoring to accommodate
the CSI architecture changes that needed to take place. This meant rolling
in the libStorage functionality which unfortunately skews the numbers a bit.
The {code} team has been primary maintainers on the framework where
collaborators have mainly focused on building drivers. Other storage
companies who understand the complexity involved in building a solid CSI
implementation see the value and commonality that can be addressed by
REX-Ray and are interested in collaborating if supported via a foundation.

Production users: Yes, REX-Ray is being used in production by some of the
users listed in the slides. Up to this point, usage levels have been tied
closely to production deployment of Mesos & Docker.

Sandbox: I believe the numbers and history justify incubation, but we can
discuss it.

Control plane: REX-Ray used to have its own control plane (libStorage API)
prior to CSI. In most recent we have made architectural changes to be adhere
to CSI.  When libStorage was its control-plane, there was integration work
performed to make libStorage a volume plugin and additionally to Cloud
Foundry. Today, anyone who implements CSI on the cluster orchestrator side
can talk with any REX-Ray plugin.

Data plane: REX-Ray is not involved in the data-plane of storage operations.
It is an orchestrator and simply gets two components (local/remote storage &
an OS) connected. It essentially performs the exact same steps that someone
would manually perform to get these two components communicating and the
reverse on tear down.

Persistent state: It is completely stateless today.




Clint Kitson
Technical Director for {code}
CNCF Governing Board Member
---
email: Clinton.Kitson@...
mobile: "+1 424 645 4116"
team: theCodeTeam.com
twitter: "@clintkitson"
github: github.com/clintkitson