We’re in the process of shifting from using our custom ‘glue’ for orchestrating Docker deployments to Kubernetes, When we first deployed Docker to replace LXC and our legacy Puppet-heavy application configuration and deployment systems there really wasn’t any existing tool to manage this, thus we rolled our own, mainly a few Ruby scripts combined with a Puppet / Hiera / Mcollective driven workflow.
The main objective is to replace our legacy NFS file servers used to host uploads / attachments and static files for our web applications, while NFS(v4) performance is adequate, it is a clear single point of failure and of course, there are the age old stale mount problems should network interruptions occur.

Sam McLeod

A hands-on evaluation of GlusterFS as a replacement for NFS file servers in a Kubernetes migration context. The author deployed a 3-node GlusterFS cluster (replica 3, arbiter 1) on CentOS 7 VMs, automated via Puppet and Hiera. Performance benchmarks using fio reveal acceptable sequential reads (~380MB/s) but poor sequential writes (~25.6MB/s) and mediocre 4K IOPS. Key pain points include excessive open file handles (~1.5 million on idle nodes), scattered and inconsistent configuration files, memory leaks causing OOM kills and volume corruption between versions 3.10–3.12, and slow CLI tooling that makes bulk volume option changes impractically slow (16+ minutes for 200 volumes × 5 options).