Purpose

Hello, and welcome to learnceph.org. As you can probably guess by the name, this is where I’m going to document my journey from neophyte to hopefully becoming fairly proficient with Ceph. I’ll be using “Jewel” which at the time of this writing, is the latest stable version. I haven’t quite determined yet how I’ll update this site when newer versions become stable, but I do intend to keep this site updated.

I guess I should immediately mention that I will be setting this up in a lab environment, and will not be using any data that I care about, as I expect I’ll be making mistakes along the way. If you decide to follow along, please remember that I’ll be documenting my mistakes and successes equally. Doing so with data you care about will likely lead to data loss. You’ve been warned!

What is ceph?
From their docs: Ceph is a free-software storage platform that implements object storage on a single distributed computer cluster, and provides interfaces for object-, block- and file-level storage. Ceph aims primarily for completely distributed operation without a single point of failure, scalable to the exabyte level, and freely available.
Ceph replicates data and makes it fault-tolerant,using commodity hardware and requiring no specific hardware support. As a result of its design, the system is both self-healing and self-managing, aiming to minimize administration time and other costs.

I’ll add: It also includes a plethora of features that you’d generally find in higher tier SAN or other storage solutions, such as: thin provisioning, copy on write, snapshots, fault tolerance, fast replication, as well as being aware of multiple failure domains (such as node, rack, pod, row, floor, datacenter, etc.) thus allowing data to be resilient in different failure scenarios.
Best of all, Ceph has been added to the native linux kernel since 2.6.39, so any modern linux machine should be able to use it.

Who is this site for?
I’m not sure who might find this site useful to be honest. The primary goal is to document my own learning experience. If it helps others in the process.. even better. So, I don’t have a specific target audience. Instead, I’ll tell you a little about my background. I have a fair bit of linux experience, but I don’t have a lot of exposure to storage systems other than standard hardware and software RAID (and primarily RAID levels 1,5, and 10.) I have some experience with clustered servers and services, and high availability. For the typical reader, I’m only going to assume a solid linux knowledge. If you don’t have that, I’d encourage you to check out some of the great free courses at EdX, Coursera, or Cybrary before attempting to learn a specific skillset in linux.

Originally published at Learn Ceph!.