Book Image

Ceph: Designing and Implementing Scalable Storage Systems

By : Michael Hackett, Vikhyat Umrao, Karan Singh, Nick Fisk, Anthony D'Atri, Vaibhav Bhembre
Book Image

Ceph: Designing and Implementing Scalable Storage Systems

By: Michael Hackett, Vikhyat Umrao, Karan Singh, Nick Fisk, Anthony D'Atri, Vaibhav Bhembre

Overview of this book

This Learning Path takes you through the basics of Ceph all the way to gaining in-depth understanding of its advanced features. You’ll gather skills to plan, deploy, and manage your Ceph cluster. After an introduction to the Ceph architecture and its core projects, you’ll be able to set up a Ceph cluster and learn how to monitor its health, improve its performance, and troubleshoot any issues. By following the step-by-step approach of this Learning Path, you’ll learn how Ceph integrates with OpenStack, Glance, Manila, Swift, and Cinder. With knowledge of federated architecture and CephFS, you’ll use Calamari and VSM to monitor the Ceph environment. In the upcoming chapters, you’ll study the key areas of Ceph, including BlueStore, erasure coding, and cache tiering. More specifically, you’ll discover what they can do for your storage system. In the concluding chapters, you will develop applications that use Librados and distributed computations with shared object classes, and see how Ceph and its supporting infrastructure can be optimized. By the end of this Learning Path, you'll have the practical knowledge of operating Ceph in a production environment. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Ceph Cookbook by Michael Hackett, Vikhyat Umrao and Karan Singh • Mastering Ceph by Nick Fisk • Learning Ceph, Second Edition by Anthony D'Atri, Vaibhav Bhembre and Karan Singh
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
Title Page
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Ansible


As mentioned, Ansible will be the orchestration tool of choice for this book, let's look at it in a bit more detail.

Ansible is an agentless orchestration tool written in Python, which uses SSH to carry out configuration tasks on remote nodes. It was first released in 2012 and has gained widespread adoption, and it is known for its ease of adoption and low learning curve. Red Hat purchased the commercial company Ansible, Inc. in 2015 and so has a very well-developed and close-knit integration for deploying Ceph.

Files named playbooks are used in Ansible to describe a list of commands, actions, and configurations to carry out on specified hosts or groups of hosts and are stored in a YAML file format. Instead of having large unmanageable playbooks, Ansible roles can be created that allow a playbook to contain a single task, which may then carry out a number of tasks associated with the role.

The use of SSH to connect to remote nodes and execute the playbooks means that it is very lightweight...