Ceph

Data & Storage intermediate

Ceph is an open-source distributed storage system providing object, block, and file storage in a single unified platform designed for scalability and fault tolerance.

Summary

Ceph is an open-source, software-defined storage platform that delivers object, block, and file storage from a single unified cluster. It is designed to be self-healing, self-managing, and scalable to exabyte capacities.

What is Ceph?

Ceph stores data across a cluster of commodity servers using its CRUSH algorithm to distribute data without a central lookup table. This eliminates single points of failure and allows the cluster to grow by simply adding nodes.

The platform exposes three storage interfaces: RADOS Block Device (RBD) for block storage, CephFS for POSIX-compliant shared file systems, and RADOS Gateway (RGW) for an S3- and Swift-compatible object storage API. Kubernetes uses Ceph via the Rook operator to provide persistent storage for containerized workloads.

Ceph replicates or erasure-codes data across OSDs (Object Storage Daemons), automatically rebalancing and recovering when nodes are added or removed.

Why is Ceph relevant?

  • Unified storage: One platform for block, file, and object storage reduces operational complexity
  • Scalability: Scales horizontally from terabytes to exabytes without architecture changes
  • Self-healing: Automatically detects and recovers from hardware failures
  • Kubernetes integration: Widely used as the storage backend for Kubernetes clusters via Rook

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