As OpenStack's cloud file sharing tool, Manila is a reliable solution providing high-performance, highly scalable storage to users. Read more.
File sharing and storage is a thriving entity within cloud-based environments. As OpenStack's cloud file sharing tool, Manila is a reliable solution providing high-performance, highly scalable storage to users. Here is an overview of the project and how it benefits OpenStack cloud users.
Basics of OpenStack Manila
Manila was originally derived from OpenStack's block storage tool, Cinder. Similar to Cinder offering canonical control plane for block storage, Manila provides canonical storage provisioning control plane for shared or distributed file systems in OpenStack. Like Cinder, users in Manila can configure multiple backends. With Manila, a user can store content repositories, web server farms, development environments, big data apps, home directories, and more. The service also has a share-server assigned to every tenant.
As an open source cloud file sharing service, Manila has certain objectives:
- To quickly add new behaviors through a component-based architecture
- Scaling serious workloads with high availability
- Be fault-tolerant by isolating processes and thus avoiding cascading failures
- Be recoverable by easily diagnosing, debugging, and rectifying failures
- Have open standards by being a reference implementation for community-driven API
Benefits of Cloud File Sharing with Manila
Cloud file sharing with OpenStack Manila gives users several benefits. Secure file sharing with user access control is one of the major advantages. This means that the service allows you to control access by various users. This access control is done by limiting permissions on mounting and operating files. The file-sharing can only be accessed through servers with appropriate credentials.