As you know shared file systems are a tricky problem. One solution to that problem is a distributed file system. Something each one of your app nodes can read from and write to. When it comes to distributed file systems, GlusterFS is one of the leading products.

With a few simple scripts on your Mac OS X or Linux machine, you can deploy a multi-zone HA GlusterFS cluster to Google Compute Engine (GCE) that provides scalable, persistent shared storage for your GCE or Google Container Engine (GKE) Kubernetes clusters.

By default it is set to three GlusterFS servers, one server per Google Cloud zone in the same chosen region.

Before continuing, please make sure you have:

• A Google Cloud account
• The Google Cloud SDK installed
• Git installed

$ git clone https://github.com/rimusz/glusterfs-gce
$ cd glusterfs-gce/cluster

• Edit the cluster/settings file and set PROJECT, REGION and ZONES, the rest of settings in this file are probably fine, but can be adjusted if need be.

$ ./create_cluster.sh

This command will create three servers.

Each server will have:

• A static IP
• The GlusterFS server package installed
• A Google Cloud persistent disk to be used as a GlusterFS brick, that is: storage space made available to the cluster

A GlusterFS volume is a collection of bricks. A volume can store data across the bricks in three basic ways: distributed, striped, or replicated.

With the script below you will be able to create GFS replicated volumes on all three servers automaticly:

$ cd ..
$ ./create_volume.sh VOLUME_NAME

You can check Kubernetes GlusterFS example how to use GlusterFS with Kubernetes.

In cluster folder there are two more scripts:

• upgrade_glusterfs.sh - allows to upgrade GlusterFS server package on all servers
• upgrade_servers.sh - runs apt-get update && apt-get upgrade on all servers