Call for Interest: Managed SMB Protocol Support

Hello Ceph List, I'd like to formally let the wider community know of some work I've been involved with for a while now: adding Managed SMB Protocol Support to Ceph. SMB being the well known network file protocol native to Windows systems and supported by MacOS (and Linux). The other key word "managed" meaning integrating with Ceph management tooling - in this particular case cephadm for orchestration and eventually a new MGR module for managing SMB shares. The effort is still in it's very early stages. We have a PR adding initial support for Samba Containers to cephadm [1] and a prototype for an smb MGR module [2]. We plan on using container images based on the samba-container project [3] - a team I am already part of. What we're aiming for is a feature set similar to the current NFS integration in Ceph, but with a focus on bridging non-Linux/Unix clients to CephFS using a protocol built into those systems. A few major features we have planned include: * Standalone servers (internally defined users/groups) * Active Directory Domain Member Servers * Clustered Samba support * Exporting Samba stats via Prometheus metrics * A `ceph` cli workflow loosely based on the nfs mgr module I wanted to share this information in case there's wider community interest in this effort. I'm happy to take your questions / thoughts / suggestions in this email thread, via Ceph slack (or IRC), or feel free to attend a Ceph Orchestration weekly meeting! I try regularly attend and we sometimes discuss design aspects of the smb effort there. It's on the Ceph Community Calendar. Thanks! [1] - https://github.com/ceph/ceph/pull/55068 [2] - https://github.com/ceph/ceph/pull/56350 [3] - https://github.com/samba-in-kubernetes/samba-container/ Thanks for reading, --John Mulligan