[ANNOUNCE] EC Read/Write Functionality Available in Apache Ozone Master Branch

[Uma gangumalla <um...@apache.org>]

Dear Ozone Devs,

This is to let you know that we have merged the EC branch ( HDDS-3816-ec )
into master.

This is a significant milestone for EC and Ozone as well. Thank you
everyone in the branch development, namely Stephen, Pifta, Marton, Mark,
Kaijie, Attila, Chen, Jackson, Janus and whoever is involved in
development.

Thanks to Arpit, Karthik Krishnamurthy, Sidd for helpful feedback on
offline discussions.

A great help from the Upgrade team as well to get compatibility and upgrade
issues closure. Thanks to Pifta, Ethan, Aravindan, Ritesh.

Few Stats from the Branch:
====================
*Files Changed:   325*
*Commits (Few are merge commits though) : 147 *
*Lines Added: 24, 695 lines*
*Lines Deleted: 1302 lines*

Everyone please pull the latest changes and give a try on EC write and read
operations.
HDDS-3816-ec branch closed now, please don't commit anything to that branch.

We are actively working on EC Phase-II, HDDS-6462: Erasure Coding Offline
Recovery & Read/Write Improvements

This will help to recover the container when node loss/ disk failures. So,
readers need not do online recovery(which is a degraded read). Also it will
avoid running the replicas with low redundancy.

If you find any issues or wanted to suggest any improvements please file a
JIRA under HDDS-6462

Regards,
Uma ( On Behalf of EC Branch Devs )