Ideas for storage server

Hi, dear FreeBSD community!

Introduction

My name is Ivan. I'm a software developer with a background in Java and C++. Because of the enormous demand for programmers with DevOps skills, I'm working on a daily basis with Kubernetes. But I hate it since when 5 years ago I started working with. Kubernetes is overkill for the majority of tasks(IMHO). But probably my view on the deployments is transformed due to the long work with the tool.

Story

There are a few of my own small pet projects that run on FreeBSD, and I like how it goes. But now I'm going to run my new service, which probably has to be scaled soon. The service stores and manages files over the network. It helps to manage file TV journalists or filmmakers. So the current client demand is 1 TB of space. But for the next one will be on board quite soon after the first one.

The clients upload files not often, it's not a high load service, so probably the one instance can manage 10-50 clients simultaneously. But memory demand is high. So now I know how to do that with volumes in the Kubernetes cluster, but no clue how to manage it with FreeBSD.

Use case

The client is using 1 TB of memory. Tomorrow the client's demand is changed to 2 TB. So I will resize the volume or create a new one. If there are no available resources, I run one more VPS server, then add a worker node into the cluster and create a new volume. The work is done. How the FreeBSD solution would look like?

I'm hosting my services on a local VPS provider in Europe, not AWS, GCP, or DigitalOcean, so EC2 and amazon's balancers are not available to me. Appreciate any advice on how I can manage all of this with FreeBSD, or stop me if it's a crazy idea to manage that kind of cluster for the one-man army.

Thanks!
 
If I understand your post correctly:
  • You are serving 1-2 TB of cloud storage to customers with 10-50 simultaneous users.
  • The cloud storage is built from multiple VPS servers.
  • Each VPS server is a node in a Kubernetes cluster.
  • If you cannot increase the storage of a single VPS server anymore, you add another VPS server to the cluster.
  • You don't like to work with Kubernetes and you feel like it is overkill.
  • Now you want to know if if you can do the same thing with FreeBSD?
    • If so, would you like to know if you can build a "FreeBSD storage cluster"?
    • Or would you like to know how to build one large FreeBSD storage server?
 
Why don't you just user net/glusterfs for that task? Note though that adding storage to your little service by just firing up a new VPS is in the end might be a bad design decision, because every new VPS increases the failure probability of it.
 
Sounds like you have a working system there with a large amount of omitted technical details about how you manage the kube storage resizing, and you want somebody to suggest how to replicate it in FreeBSD? I think you will need to be much more specific about the details and what you want to get rid of.
 
you do not want to use glusterfs on FreeBSD, it's a nice toy for hobbyists but not for professional use. Maybe have a look at www/minio
 
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