[Sheepdog] short update on where we are headed

[Steven Dake]

Hi,

Posting a short update as to where we are headed.  I have had a good
long look at the sheepdog source base and believe the sheepdog devs and
community have developed a great solution.  To say it is brilliant is an
understatement.

Since there is no point in re-inventing the wheel when a better one
already exists, I want us to solve one obstacle to wide-scale sheepdog
deployment.

In simple terms, sheepdog requires a membership system and low
performance atomic commit framework.  Corosync provides a membership
system and very high performance atomic commit framework, but at low
scale.  By relaxing performance requirements around commits, we can
scale to very high node counts.

The goals of this project are changing as a result to provide a high
scale membership protocol (d1ht) as well as low performance commit
framework.  While I personally feel this has many applications outside
of sheepdog, our first target will be to provide a framework for which
sheepdog can use for membership and commit.

Regards
-steve