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Configuring Alluxio with Swift

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This guide describes how to configure Alluxio with an under storage system supporting the Swift API.

Initial Setup

First, the Alluxio binaries must be on your machine. You can either compile Alluxio, or download the binaries locally.

Configuring Alluxio

You need to configure Alluxio to use under storage systems by modifying conf/alluxio-site.properties. If it does not exist, create the configuration file from the template.

cp conf/alluxio-site.properties.template conf/alluxio-site.properties

You need to configure Alluxio to use Swift as its under storage system by modifying conf/alluxio-site.properties. Modify conf/alluxio-site.properties to include:

alluxio.underfs.address=swift://<swift-container>

Where <swift-container> is an existing Swift container.

The following configuration should be provided in the conf/alluxio-site.properties

fs.swift.user=<swift-user>
fs.swift.tenant=<swift-tenant>
fs.swift.password=<swift-user-password>
fs.swift.auth.url=<swift-auth-url>
fs.swift.use.public.url=<swift-use-public>
fs.swift.auth.method=<swift-auth-model>

Possible values of <swift-use-public> are true, false. Possible values of <swift-auth-model> are keystonev3, keystone, tempauth, swiftauth. When using either keystone authentication, the following parameter can optionally be set

fs.swift.region=<swift-preferred-region>

Alternatively, these configuration settings can be set in the conf/alluxio-env.sh file. More details about setting configuration parameters can be found in Configuration Settings.

On the successful authentication, Keystone will return two access URLs: public and private. If Alluxio is used inside company network and Swift is located on the same network it is adviced to set value of <swift-use-public> to false.

Options for Swift Object Storage

Using the Swift module makes Ceph Object Storage and IBM SoftLayer Object Storage as under storage options for Alluxio. To use Ceph, the Rados Gateway module must be deployed.

Running Alluxio Locally with Swift

After everything is configured, you can start up Alluxio locally to see that everything works.

./bin/alluxio format
./bin/alluxio-start.sh local

This should start an Alluxio master and an Alluxio worker. You can see the master UI at http://localhost:19999.

Next, you can run a simple example program:

./bin/alluxio runTests

After this succeeds, you can visit your Swift container to verify the files and directories created by Alluxio exist. For this test, you should see files named like:

swift://<SWIFT CONTAINER>/alluxio/data/default_tests_files/Basic_CACHE_THROUGH

To stop Alluxio, you can run:

./bin/alluxio-stop.sh local

Running functional tests

Configure your Swift account credentials under swiftTest in tests/pom.xml, where authMethodKey should be keystone or tempauth or swiftauth. To run functional tests execute

mvn test -PswiftTest -pl tests

In case of failures, logs located under tests/target/logs. You may also activate heap dump via

  <argLine>-XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError
    -XX:HeapDumpPath=/location/dump</argLine>

Swift Access Control

If Alluxio security is enabled, Alluxio enforces the access control inherited from underlying object storage.

The Swift credentials specified in Alluxio (fs.swift.user, fs.swift.tenant and fs.swift.password) represents a Swift user. Swift service backend checks the user permission to the container. If the given Swift user does not have the right access permission to the specified container, a permission denied error will be thrown. When Alluxio security is enabled, Alluxio loads the container ACL to Alluxio permission on the first time when the metadata is loaded to Alluxio namespace.

Mount point sharing

If you want to share the Swift mount point with other users in Alluxio namespace, you can enable alluxio.underfs.object.store.mount.shared.publicly.

Permission change

In addition, chown/chgrp/chmod to Alluxio directories and files do NOT propagate to the underlying Swift containers nor objects.