GlusterFS is a free and open source software-defined distributed storage system written primarily in C that scales to several petabytes and provides interfaces for object, block, and file storage. The project is hosted at https://www.gluster.org and represents a mature effort to enable organizations to build distributed storage infrastructure rapidly.
The codebase is classified across multiple domains including scalability, reliability, high-availability, volume management, clustering, network-attached storage, filesystem operations, block storage, performance optimization, and data management. The repository's topic tags reflect its core capabilities: distributed systems architecture, erasure coding for data protection, FUSE filesystem integration, replication mechanisms, snapshot functionality, Kubernetes storage integration through k8s-sig-storage, and the libgfapi library for programmatic access. The project maintains dual licensing under GPLv2 and LGPLv3+, providing flexibility for different deployment scenarios.
The project includes comprehensive functional testing infrastructure with test files located in the tests directory, where all patches submitted for review are validated. The testing framework uses .t test files and provides a run-tests.sh script for local validation, with support for the prove tool for selective test execution. The development workflow is documented in a Contributors guide, while deployment instructions are available in an INSTALL file. Documentation is centralized at docs.gluster.org and includes quick-start guides, release notes, and a mailing list for community discussion. The project maintains an active community presence through Slack channels, YouTube development sessions, Twitter updates, and a formal maintainers list documented in the repository.
