Welcome to Mayastor!

The native NVMe-oF CAS engine of OpenEBS

This documentation is staged on an unstable branch

It is provided here as a convenience to the writers, reviewers and editors of Mayastor's user documentation, to provide easy visualisation of content before publishing. It MUST NOT be used to guide the installation or use of Mayastor, other than for pre-release testing outside of production. As a staging branch, it is expected at times to contain errors and to be incomplete. The official Mayastor User Reference for the latest GA release can be found here

What is Mayastor?

Mayastor is a performance optimised "Container Attached Storage" (CAS) solution of the CNCF project OpenEBS. The goal of OpenEBS is to extend Kubernetes with a declarative data plane, providing flexible persistent storage for stateful applications.

Design goals for Mayastor include:

  • Highly available, durable persistence of data

  • To be readily deployable and easily managed by autonomous SRE or development teams

  • To be a low-overhead abstraction for NVMe-based storage devices

Mayastor incorporates Intel's Storage Performance Development Kit. It has been designed from the ground up to leverage the protocol and compute efficiency of NVMe-oF semantics, and the performance capabilities of the latest generation of solid-state storage devices, in order to deliver a storage abstraction with performance overhead measured to be within the range of single-digit percentages.

By comparison, most "shared everything" storage systems are widely thought to impart an overhead of at least 40% (and sometimes as much as 80% or more) as compared to the capabilities of the underlying devices or cloud volumes; additionally traditional shared storage scales in an unpredictable manner as I/O from many workloads interact and compete for resources.

While Mayastor utilizes NVMe-oF it does not require NVMe devices or cloud volumes to operate and can work well with other device types.

Where can I find Mayastor?

Mayastor's source code and documentation are distributed amongst a number of GitHub repositories under the OpenEBS organisation. The following list describes some of the main repositories but is not exhaustive.

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