Enabling AFM caching

IBM Storage Scale active file management (AFM) to cloud storage enables automatic tiering of application data to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) or Google Cloud Storage (GCS).

For a detailed explanation of the AFM feature, see Introduction to AFM to cloud object storage.

If the cloud object storage target is AWS S3, the cloudkit simplifies the authentication setup that is needed by using the AWS instance IAM profile. Whereas if the target is GCS, the service account that is chosen during the configuration is used to generate the HMAC credentials, which are further used to setup authentication to the GCS bucket from gateway nodes.

To enable AFM to cloud object storage, use the ./cloudkit caching setup command. The following steps illustrate a simplified setup of AFM caching.

  1. Deploy the AFM gateway nodes.

    Use the ./cloudkit edit cluster command to provision or add AFM gateway nodes to an existing storage cluster or combined cluster.

  2. Set up AFMCOSKeys for the AFM caching.
    • For AWS, no additional configuration is needed because the IAM permissions are attached.
    • For GCP, create a service account.
    • For Microsoft Azure, create service principals.
  3. Configure AFM to cloud object storage.
    To enable an AFM relationship, issue the ./cloudkit caching setup command.