Other storage backends?

[the-maldridge]

Right now it looks like Zot is a fantastic registry if I want to run it on a single machine. I'm particularly drawn to the LDAP support even though my preferred authentication only speaks LDAP by proxy. What I don't see is a way to run zot horizontally available. Is there no way to run Zot on top of a remote object store or similar option with nonlocal storage?

[rchincha]

@the-maldridge thanks for looking at zot.

As long as remote storage can be locally mounted (eg., [1], [2], [3]), zot can be configured to serve from that mount point. Yes, we don't support ability to manage multiple mount points yet.

About horizontal scaling, from our experience, the network becomes a bottleneck far quicker than CPU and memory and we are thinking about addressing clustering [4] with this in mind.

[1] https://github.com/s3fs-fuse/s3fs-fuse
[2] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/storage/files/
[3] https://docs.ceph.com/en/latest/man/8/mount.ceph/
[4] #125

[the-maldridge]

Thanks for the speedy reply. I was most concerned with doing any mountpoints that don't support full POSIX abstraction based on the deduplication via hardlinks, which I don't think work quite right on some of the fuse drivers I use regularly.

I'll keep an eye on #125.

[rchincha]

@the-maldridge pls take a look at: https://github.com/anuvu/zot/releases/tag/v1.2.0
It is an interim solution until we have full clustering (although we consider both complementary)

[the-maldridge]

I must admit its not super clear what I'm looking at. Can you post a bit more detail about what changed or where I can find more documentation?

[rchincha]

I must admit its not super clear what I'm looking at. Can you post a bit more detail about what changed or where I can find more documentation?

To summarize: "Serve multiple storage paths (and backends) using a single zot server"

Perhaps best explained with an example config:
https://github.com/anuvu/zot/blob/master/examples/config-multiple.json

Basically, with this release, it is now possible to store images in multiple mounts/backends each with their own GC and dedupe policies but serve them in a unified way.

Hope this makes it clearer.

[rchincha]

Just to add:

Your storage can now be one or more of these:

1. Local storage
2. Traditional remote storage such as NFS and CIFS
3. Cloud storage such as AWS S3 [1], Azure BlobStorage [2]

References:
[1] s3-fuse
[2] azure-storage-fuse

[rchincha]

@the-maldridge would love to hear your feedback, if and when you are able to try this feature out.

[the-maldridge]

For sure, I've been busy this last week with the Freenode melt-down, but I should have some time this week to take a look.

[rchincha]

We are making some progress with PR #216. Planning to add support for other vendors as well.
The original proposal of using fuse drivers still holds valid. PR #216 allows us to avoid fuse drivers altogether which is useful when running in containers without privileges (bind mounting /dev/fuse needs SYS_ADMIN capabilities)