Object Storage and Cyrus IMAP

[ellie timoney]

On Fri, Jun 5, 2020, at 4:48 AM, Albert Shih wrote:
> Le 04/06/2020 à 10:23:12+0200, Marco a écrit
> > Hello,
> >
> >    I see that Cyrus IMAP 3 can interface with some Object Storage such as
> > Caringo or OpenIO.
> >
> > Is anyone using these solutions?
> >
> > I would like to know how I can find more details about these deployment,
> > other than the brief description in imapd.conf man page.
> >
> > In particular I would like to know if these interfaces are stable and
> > supported in future releases of Cyrus IMAP.
> >
> > Do you plan to add wider support to object storage, maybe by adopting some
> > standard vendor independent?
> >
> > I thank you very much for every info you could provide.
> 
> No sure if my informations are still correct, but long time ago, I ask
> openio about that. They say the connector between openIO and cyrus are
> maintained by openIO, it's not opensource and you need to pay a licence.
> 
> And when Cyrus make a new release openio would make adjustment to make it
> work.
> 
> I not sure who use that, but as I ear they(openIO) got few customer use
> this solution on a very large scale > 1Po.

Our object storage support was contributed by one of those two vendors (i.e Caringo or OpenIO, though I don't remember which).  As I understand it, they implemented support in Cyrus for both backends, to ensure that the object storage support was generalised, not specific to their own product.  This might have been a condition we imposed for accepting their patches?

Anyway, in theory, some third backend (whether closed- or open-source) could be similarly integrated, now that the abstract support is there.  I don't know if such a third backend even exists.

Looking through commit history, the last commits from the vendor developers to the object storage code were just before the release of 3.0.0.  So I would expect this works okay for 3.0 deployments.  I'm not sure about 3.2 -- we haven't had any specific updates, so maybe it works okay and doesn't need any?  Or maybe it won't work until it's updated, and their customers are simply staying on 3.0 for the time being.

I guess this is kind of a long-winded way of saying, you probably need to speak to those vendors about this.  Whether Cyrus supports their backend is almost incidental compared to the larger question of whether (and how) they support their backend being used from Cyrus.

Cheers,

ellie