Speaker
Description
With the move to HTTP/WebDAV and JSON Web Tokens as a standard protocol for transfers within the WLCG distributed storage network, a large amount of off-the-shelf technologies become viable for meeting the requirements of a Storage Element (SE). In this work, we explore the capabilities and performance of the OpenResty framework, which extends the nginx server with the LuaJIT scripting language, to recreate the feature set of a SE. We demonstrate token-authenticated HTTP read, write, and WebDAV third-party copy features, as well as a storage federation with HTTP redirect, proxy, and caching capabilities. We further explore the performance scaling in terms of throughput and requests per second.
Significance
This is an alternative to the xrootd server software stack that meets the requirements of a WLCG grid site, and is based on popular open source technologies. This has the potential to provide improved performance and a lower maintenance burden. This also enables rapid experimentation with advancements such as HTTP/2.
