Stratis Unleashed | RHEL Presents Ep. 74

Episode 74 was one Brian Smith and I had in the works for months. We finally sat down to talk about Stratis, a feature that had been in tech preview since RHEL 8.0, and the very first thing I did was debunk the myth that it’s a file system. It isn’t. To sort it all out we brought back product manager Bob Hanlon, who helped shape the plan for Stratis in its early days, and pulled in specialist solutions architect Billy Holmes, who we grabbed off the previous week’s Day in the Life episode.

A few things worth carrying away from the conversation:

• Stratis is a storage management tool, not a file system. I said it up top and I’ll say it again here, because it’s the single most common misunderstanding and the whole episode hinges on getting that straight.
• Being a storage target raises the bar. Bob pointed out that Red Hat doesn’t always ship storage as a target, and when you do, expectations around data protection and data management go way up, which is part of why Stratis took its time.
• It’s been a long road out of tech preview. This feature spent close to five years maturing since RHEL 8.0, and watching it grow and change is a good lesson in how deliberately storage gets built.

If you manage local storage on RHEL and want a cleaner way to do it, this episode is a solid introduction to what Stratis is really for.