docs: add High Availability information for s3gw and Longhorn

Fixes: https://github.com/aquarist-labs/s3gw/issues/841
Signed-off-by: Giuseppe Baccini <[email protected]>

docs/high-availability.md

@@ -0,0 +1,70 @@
+# High Availability with s3gw and Longhorn
+
+The s3gw mainly relies on Kubernetes and Longhorn to achieve High Availability (HA).
+
+A single s3gw instance is attached to its private Longhorn-provided persistent
+volume (PV) with Kubernetes restarting/redeploying as necessary on failure.
+
+In the context of the s3gw and Longhorn, this HA model is called: *Active/Standby*.
+
+The PV's state is guaranteed by Longhorn ensuring that a PV, along with
+its content, will always be available on all cluster nodes.
+This means that the s3gw can mount its Longhorn PV regardless of the
+current scheduling on the cluster.
+
+Obviously, the s3gw can't achieve higher availability or reliability than
+the underlying Longhorn volumes.
+This means that any corruption should occur in the file system is outside what
+s3gw can reasonably protect against; that's all undefined behavior and "restore
+from backup" time.
+
+The *Active/Standby* model claims the following characteristics:
+
+- Simplicity
+- Compatible with RWO persistent volume semantics
+- Acceptable restart timings on switch-overs and fail-overs
+  (excluding the non-graceful node failures, [see below](#non-graceful-node-failure))
+
+With the current s3gw's implementation we expect to solve mainly the following
+failure scenarios:
+
+- s3gw pod failure: this scenario occurs when the s3gw stops due to an error in
+  the backend pod.
+
+- s3gw pod rescheduling: this case applies when Kubernetes decides to reschedule
+  the pod to another node, eg: when the node goes low on resources. This would often
+  be called a "switch-over" in an HA cluster - e.g., an administratively orchestrated
+  transition of the service to a new node (say, for maintenance/upgrade/etc reasons).
+  This has the advantage of being schedulable, so it can happen at times of low load
+  if these exist.
+
+When any of these scenarios should happen, Kubernetes restarts the s3gw pod and we
+expect the service to be restored in seconds.
+
+## Non-graceful node failure
+
+Currently, Kubernetes ([1.28](https://kubernetes.io/releases/) at the time of
+writing this), does not automatically restart a pod attached to a RWO volume
+in the event that the node running it suffers a failure.
+Reasons behind this behavior is that workloads, such as RWO volumes require
+*at-most-one* semantics.
+Failures affecting these kind of workloads risk data loss and/or corruption
+if nodes (and the workloads running on them) are wrongly assumed to be dead.
+For this reason it is crucial to know that the node has reached a safe state
+before initiating recovery of the workload.
+
+Longhorn offers the option to perform a [Pod Deletion Policy][pod-deletion-policy]
+when a node should go down unexpectedly.
+This means that Longhorn will force delete StatefulSet/Deployment terminating pods
+on nodes that are down to release Longhorn volumes so that Kubernetes
+can spin up replacement pods.
+
+Anyway, when employing this mitigation, the user must be aware that assuming a node
+dead could lead to data loss and/or corruption if that assumption was actually untrue.
+
+The s3gw and the Longhorn team is currently investigating some
+[hypotheses of solutions][longhorn-issue-1]
+to address this problem at its roots.
+
+[pod-deletion-policy]: https://longhorn.io/docs/1.5.1/references/settings/#pod-deletion-policy-when-node-is-down
+[longhorn-issue-1]: https://github.com/longhorn/longhorn/issues/6803

mkdocs.yml

@@ -23,6 +23,7 @@ nav:
       - Installing s3gw with Helm charts: helm-charts.md
       - Configuring the s3gw: config-s3gw.md
       - Advanced usage: advanced-usage.md
+  - High Availability: high-availability.md
   - Troubleshooting the s3gw: troubleshoot-s3gw.md
   - Development Manual:
       - Developing the S3gw: developing.md