Swift

Prerequisites
Basic Setup
- Root Mount Point
- Nested Mount Point
Options for Swift Object Storage
Running Alluxio Locally with Swift
Running functional tests
Advanced Setup

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

Prerequisites

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

Basic Setup

A Swift bucket can be mounted to the Alluxio either at the root of the namespace, or at a nested directory.

Root Mount Point

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

Modify conf/alluxio-site.properties to include:

alluxio.master.mount.table.root.ufs=swift://<bucket>/<folder>
alluxio.master.mount.table.root.option.fs.swift.user=<swift-user>
alluxio.master.mount.table.root.option.fs.swift.tenant=<swift-tenant>
alluxio.master.mount.table.root.option.fs.swift.password=<swift-user-password>
alluxio.master.mount.table.root.option.fs.swift.auth.url=<swift-auth-url>
alluxio.master.mount.table.root.option.fs.swift.auth.method=<swift-auth-model>

Replace <bucket>/<folder> with an existing Swift bucket location. 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:

alluxio.master.mount.table.root.option.fs.swift.region=<swift-preferred-region>

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 advised to set value of <swift-use-public> to false.

Nested Mount Point

An Swift location can be mounted at a nested directory in the Alluxio namespace to have unified access to multiple under storage systems. Alluxio’s Command Line Interface can be used for this purpose.

$ ./bin/alluxio fs mount \
  --option fs.swift.user=<SWIFT_USER> \
  --option fs.swift.tenant=<SWIFT_TENANT> \
  --option fs.swift.password=<SWIFT_PASSWORD> \
  --option fs.swift.auth.url=<AUTH_URL> \
  --option fs.swift.auth.method=<AUTH_METHOD> \
  /mnt/swift swift://<BUCKET>/<FOLDER>

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

Start an Alluxio cluster:

$ ./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.

Run a simple example program:

$ ./bin/alluxio runTests

Visit your Swift bucket to verify the files and directories created by Alluxio exist. For this test, you should see files named like:

<bucket>/<folder>/default_tests_files/BASIC_CACHE_THROUGH

To stop Alluxio, you can run:

$ ./bin/alluxio-stop.sh local

Running functional tests

The following command can be used to test if the given Swift credentials are valid. Developers can also use it to run functional tests against a Swift endpoint to validate the contract between Alluxio and Swift.

$ ./bin/alluxio runUfsTests --path swift://<bucket> \
  -Dfs.swift.user=<SWIFT_USER> \
  -Dfs.swift.tenant=<SWIFT_TENANT> \
  -Dfs.swift.password=<SWIFT_PASSWORD> \
  -Dfs.swift.auth.url=<AUTH_URL> \
  -Dfs.swift.auth.method=<AUTH_METHOD> 

Advanced Setup

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.

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, and chmod to Alluxio directories and files do NOT propagate to the underlying Swift buckets nor objects.

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