This is an excerpt from an article that I posted at storagetarget.com. The full text can be found at:

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AIStore will now aggregate not only disks (or, not just disks) but also directories. Any file directories – assuming, of course, they are not nested. Any number of regular file directories that, ostensibly, may not even have underlying block devices.

Here’s what has happened:

Upcoming

On the left and the right: an AIS cluster sandwiched between two interfaces often referred to as frontend and backend. Cluster provides the former (which inevitably entails S3 but not only), and utilizes the latter to perform fast-tiering function across vendors and solutions.

TL;DR

Long story short, the upcoming v3.23 removes the requirement that every aistore mountpath is a separate filesystem (“FS” above) that owns a block device. In the past, this block device would have to present itself at a node’s startup and wouldn’t be permitted to be used by (or shared with) any other mountpath.

Not anymore, though. Planned for late April or May 2024, the release will introduce a separate indirection called “mountpath label.”