Roadmap for a supported, non-proprietary software defined storage solution

[lgleim]

As the title suggests I would like to know if there is a roadmap for any of the many non-proprietary software defined storage (SDS) solutions to be supported.

Out of the currently supported drivers:

• EBS/EFS/DigitalOcean are nice but an external trusted party and not viable in many setups.
• NFS/VFS is not well suitable for cross data center applications and in high performance scenarios.
• Device Mapper (I believe) could be used with block-storage SDS solutions running on the host but requires quite a bit of hackery.

Looking at just the SDSs that have already been heavily referenced in current and previous project issues:

• GlusterFS was supported in the past but is no longer - probably for good reasons.
• Ceph RBD (issue RBD driver support #15) is quite similar to Amazon EBS, has been requested over 18 months ago, with docker volume drivers readily available and client support being part of the Linux kernel but no supported Rancher integration. There even seems to be some inofficial effort on providing RBD support for convoy ongoing at https://github.com/sak0/convoy-rbd. There also is CephFS, a layer on top of the Ceph Object Store providing a POSIX compliant file system layer.
• S3 backend (issue S3 backend for convoy #82) - can also be used with Ceph

That being said I believe that SDS is (and will be even more) an extremely common requirement for any Rancher deployment. Software defined networking has long been an integral part of Rancher, SDS should be as well and would out of the box provide

• volume syncing (issue Sync convoy volumes between hosts? #31)
• proper snapshot support (certainly for Ceph - not sure about the other solutions)
• encryption (for Ceph and many other)

I am looking forward to your feedback!