storage

NOTE: This blog post was written prior to Ansible including the gluster_volume module, and is out of date; the examples still work, but Ansible for DevOps has been since updated with a more relevant and complete example. You can read about it here: Simple GlusterFS Setup with Ansible (Redux).

Modern infrastructure often involves some amount of horizontal scaling; instead of having one giant server, with one storage volume, one database, one application instance, etc., most apps use two, four, ten, or dozens of servers.

Many applications can be scaled horizontally with ease, but what happens when you need shared resources, like files, application code, or other transient data, to be shared on all the servers? And how do you have this data scale out with your infrastructure, in a fast but reliable way? There are many different approaches to synchronizing or distributing files across servers: