Roadmap


This Technology Roadmap documents the state of the technical direction chosen for the iRODS data management software. It is the product of community feedback, our collective experience, and the guidance of the iRODS Consortium Technology Working Group.

If you have an opinion about where iRODS should go next, I encourage you to participate in this open software development process. Join the iRODS chat Google Group. Raise issues on GitHub. And if you are a Consortium Member, get involved in the Technology Working Group.

Kory Draughn
Chief Technologist
The iRODS Consortium



Document History




2025

Kory Draughn
Chief Technologist
The iRODS Consortium
June 2025

iRODS 2025 Roadmap

With each release of iRODS, the server, libraries, and clients become more stable and featureful. The needs of users and administrators become more complex over time. Users want tools and GUIs that are easy to understand quickly. Administrators want more flexibility and visibility into what the system is doing.

In order to facilitate these needs, the Consortium plans to improve approachability by focusing on the following:

Primary Objectives

  • Include ready-to-use tools for common tasks, out of the box
  • Track and expose common metrics
  • Improve approachability and accessibility

The Server

  • Provide administrative GUI
    • Generate reports, query metrics, manage zone
  • Improve server's ability to scale
    • Use process pools and/or thread pools to service requests
    • Partition processes to handle specific tasks
    • Consider using io_uring or alternative async IO library
  • Make server cloud-friendly
    • Decouple FQDN/hostname from server
      • Allow name which identifies a server to change
    • All servers run as Catalog Service Providers
    • Centralize configuration
  • Absorb HTTP API
  • Absorb stable plugins into server
    • Metadata Guard rule engine plugin
    • Logical Quotas rule engine plugin
    • Storage Tiering capability plugin
    • S3 resource plugin
  • Replace all use of legacy parallel transfer with multi-1247 parallel transfer
    • Remove high ports
  • Make GenQuery2 the default GenQuery parser
  • Parallelize resource rebalance operation
  • Improve support for archive files
    • Deprecate all functionality stemming from special collections and imcoll
    • Make archive entries visible in the catalog
      • Design new abstractions, semantics, and APIs

Plugins and Capabilities

  • Finish and release the Policy Composition rule engine plugin
  • Finish and release the Publishing capability plugin

Libraries

  • Polish and release HTTP API client libraries
  • Implement pam_interactive authentication scheme for client libraries
    • Only applies to libraries speaking the iRODS protocol

Clients

  • Optimize the HTTP API's upload performance for large files
  • Optimize the S3 API's upload performance for large files

Testing

  • Fully automate release testing
    • Provide clear report of what was tested and what happened
    • Default test run to cover server, plugins, clients, and integrations
    • Should run on consumer hardware



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