[tahoe-dev] Tahoe-LAFS, Django, RAIC

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

Dear Tahoe-LAFS hackers, Django developers, Anders Pearson, and Jakob Pagter:

I guess it is a sign that your Free Software project is succeeding
when you have more users than you know that you have.

Today I was reading this article about Zope vs. Django persistence strategies:

http://blog.mozilla.com/webdev/2010/08/30/from-zope-import-django-persistence/

It mentioned that although Django's native persistence language has
always been SQL that there was recent interest in porting it to "NoSQL
databases". On a whim, I searched the web for "django tahoe-lafs" and
what do you know! Someone named Anders Pearson has written code to
make Django use Tahoe-LAFS as a storage backend:

http://github.com/thraxil/django-tahoestorage

The README.txt warns of performance issues. I'm not surprised! It
would be interesting to see if the performance could be improved in
various ways. For one thing, Kevan Carstensen just finished his Google
Summer of Code project which makes the directories a lot more
scalable, directly helping with the "what happens when you have too
many items in a directory" problem that the README.txt mentions.

Anders has also written "a django frontend for Tahoe-LAFS":

http://github.com/thraxil/canopy

What is "a django frontend of Tahoe-LAFS"? Is it a user interface, so
basically an alternative to the Tahoe-LAFS Web User Interface
(http://pubgrid.tahoe-lafs.org/ )?

Then I searched twitter for mention of Tahoe-LAFS and found this tweet
in Danish by Jakob Pagter:

http://twitter.com/pagter/status/22616015915

It is hard for me to understand Danish, even with the help of modern
free on-line machine translation services. But, the hyperlink leads to
this good article (in English):

http://alexandrasikkerhed.wordpress.com/2010/08/31/the-tahoe-least-authority-file-system/

It says among other things that the authors are interested in layering
a different access control model on top of Tahoe-LAFS and that they
are interested in using existing cloud storage providers as backends.

All very interesting! I would encourage the authors of such
interesting hacks to write to the tahoe-dev list and see if the
Tahoe-LAFS hackers there can help with their projects. For one thing,
Kevan Carstensen has written up a design document about how to connect
Tahoe-LAFS storage servers with extant cloud storage providers. We
call it "RAIC" -- Redundant Array of Inexpensive Clouds. :-)

For a picture of RAIC, see slide 17 of
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/raw-attachment/wiki/News/tahoe-RSA-slides.pdf
.

Kevan's design document:

http://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2010-April/004233.html

Regards,

Zooko