Swift 0.96 Release Notes
========================

Config changes
--------------

Please refer to the swift config mechanism documentation in the
userguide for a complete description of the new config mechanism

NOTE: Swift 0.95 and older used an older configuration system that used sites.xml,
swift.properties and tc.file. These configuration files can be converted to the new
configuration format using the *swift-convert-config* utility that comes with the
Swift-0.96 package.

-----
# To get help from swift-convert-config
swift-convert-config -help

# To convert a sites.xml, tc.data and swift.properties file to a swift.conf file:
swift-convert-config -sites.file sites.xml -config swift.properties \
    -tc.file tc.data -out swift.conf
-----


Staging
-------

* The provider staging mechanism is now called "local"
* A method to directly access input/output files accessible
  over a shared filesystem is made available through the
  "direct" staging method.
* "direct" staging also supports a scratch directory tag

For a complete description of staging strategies refer the
staging guides.

Support for clouds
------------------

Cloud resources from the leading vendors such as Elastic cloud compute from Amazon
and Google Compute engine from Google are now supported via execution providers.
The tutorial has documentation on how to use these providers.

Workers and Concurrency
-----------------------

The swift worker now takes a -c concurrency level option that allows
workers to support multiple concurrent tasks when not launched through
coasters.