Offload data to cheaper storage
| Status | Authors | Coach | DRIs | Owning Stage | Created |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| proposed |
jcai-gitlab
toon
|
devops systems | 2023-05-19 |
Summary
Managing Git data storage costs is a critical part of our business. Offloading Git data to cheaper storage can save on storage cost.
Motivation
At GitLab, we keep most Git data stored on SSDs to keep data access fast. This makes sense for data that we frequently need to access. However, given that storage costs scale with data growth, we can be a lot smarter about what kinds of data we keep on SSDs and what kinds of data we can afford to offload to cheaper storage.
For example, large files (or in Git nomenclature, “blobs”) are not frequently modified since they are usually non-text files (images, videos, binaries, etc). Often, Git LFS is used for repositories that contain these large blobs in order to avoid having to push a large file onto the Git server. However, this relies on client side setup.
Or, if a project is “stale” and hasn’t been accessed in a long time, there is no need to keep paying for fast storage for that project.
Instead, we can choose to put all blobs of that stale project onto cheaper storage. This way, the application still has access to the commit history and trees so the project browsing experience is not affected, but all files are on slower storage since they are rarely accessed.
If we had a way to separate Git data into different categories, we could then offload certain data to a secondary location that is cheaper. For example, we could separate large files that may not be accessed as frequently from the rest of the Git data and save it to an HDD rather than an SDD mount.
Requirements
There are a set of requirements and invariants that must be given for any particular solution.
Saves storage cost
Ultimately, this solution needs to save on storage cost. Separating out certain Git data for cheaper storage can go towards this savings.
We need to evaluate the solution’s added cost against the projected savings from offloading data to cheaper storage. Here are some criteria to consider:
- How much money would we save if all large blobs larger than X were put on HDD?
- How much money would we save if all stale projects had their blobs on HDD?
- What’s the operational overhead for running the offloading mechanism in terms of additional CPU/Memory cost?
- What’s the network overhead? e.g. is there an extra roundtrip to a different node via the network to retrieve large blobs.
- Access cost, e.g. when blobs would be stored in an object store.
Opaque to downstream consumers of Gitaly
This feature is purely storage optimization and, except for potential performance slowdown, shouldn’t affect downstream consumers of Gitaly. For example, the GitLab application should not have to change any of its logic in order to support this feature.
This feature should be completely invisible to any callers of Gitaly. Rails or any consumer should not need to know about this or manage it in any way.
Operationally Simple
When working with Git data, we want to keep things as simple as possible to minimize risk of repository corruption. Keep things operationally simple and keep moving pieces outside of Git itself to a minimum. Any logic that modifies repository data should be upstreamed in Git itself.
Proposal
We will maintain a separate object database for each repository connected through the Git alternates mechansim. We can choose to filter out certain Git objects for this secondary object database (ODB).
Place Git data into this secondary ODB based on a filter. We have options based on filters in Git.
We can choose to place large blobs based on some limit into a secondary ODB, or we can choose to place all blobs onto the secondary ODB.
Design and implementation details
Git
We need to add a feature to git-repack(1) that will allow us to segment
different kinds of blobs into different object databases. We’re tracking this
effort in this issue.
Gitaly
During Gitaly housekeeping, we can do the following:
- Use
git-repack(1)to write packfiles into both the main repository’s object database, and a secondary object database. Each repository has its own secondary object database for offloading blobs based on some criteria. - Ensure the
.git/objects/info/alternatesfile points to the secondary object database from step (1).
Criteria
Whether objects are offloaded to another object database can be determined based on one or many of the following criteria.
By Tier
Free projects might have many blobs offloaded to cheaper storage, while Ultimate projects have all their objects placed on the fastest storage.
By history
If a blob was added a long time ago and is not referred by any recent commit it can get offloaded, while new blobs remain on the main ODB.
By size
Large blobs are a quick win to reduce the expensive storage size, so they might get prioritized to move to cheaper storage.
Frequency of Access
Frequently used project might remain fully on fast storage, while inactive projects might have their blob offloaded.
Open Questions
How do we delete objects?
When we want to delete an unreachable object, the repack would need to be aware of both ODBs and be able to evict unreachable objects regardless of whether the objects are in the main ODB or in the secondary ODB. This picture is complicated if the main ODB also has an object pool ODB, since we wouldn’t ever want to delete an object from the pool ODB.
Potential Solution: Modify Git to delete an object from alternates
We would need to modify repack to give it the ability to delete unreachable
objects in alternate ODBs. We could add repack configs repack.alternates.*
that tell it how to behave with alternate directories. For example, we could
have repack.alternates.explodeUnreachable, which indicates to repack that it
should behave like -A in any alternate ODB it is linked to.
How does this work with object pools?
When we use alternates, how does this interact with object pools? Does the object pool also offload data to secondary storage? Does the object pool member? In the most complex case this means that a single repository has four different object databases, which may increase complexity.
Possibly we can mark some packfiles as “keep”, using the –keep-pack and –honor-pack-keep options.
Potential Solution: Do not allow object pools to offload their blobs
For the sake of not adding too much complexity, we could decide that object pools will not offload their blobs. Instead, we can design housekeeping to offload blobs from the repository before deduplicating with the object pool. Theoretically, this means that offloaded blobs will not end up in the object pool.
How will this work with Raft + WAL?
How will this mechanism interact with Raft and the write-ahead log?
The WAL uses hard-links and copy-free moves, to avoid slow copy operations. But that does not work across different file systems. At some point repacks and such will likely also go through the log. Transferring data between file systems can lead to delays in transaction processing.
Ideally we keep the use of an alternate internal to the node and not have to leak this complexity to the rest of the cluster. This is a challenge, given we have to consider available space when making placement decisions. It’s possible to keep this internal by only showing the lower capacity of the two storages, but that could also lead to inefficient storage use.
Problems with the design
Added complexity
The fact that we are adding another object pool to the mix adds complexity to the system, and especially with repository replication since we are adding yet another place to replicate data to.
Possible change in cost over time
The cost of the different storage types might change over time. To anticipate for this, it should be easy to adapt to such changes.
More points of failure
Having some blobs on a separate storage device adds one more failure scenario where the device hosting the large blobs may fail.
Alternative Solutions
Placing entire projects onto cheaper storage
Instead of placing Git data onto cheaper storage, the Rails application could choose to move a project in its entirety to a mounted HDD drive.
Possible optimization
Giving these machines with cheaper storage extra RAM might help to deal with the slow read/write speeds due to the use of page cache. It’s not sure though this will turn out to be cheaper overall.
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