One year ago, Karan published his first book, Learning Ceph, Packt Publishing, which has been a great success. It addressed a need that a lot of users had: an easy-to-understand introduction to Ceph and an overview of its architecture.
When an open source project has an enthusiastic community like Ceph does, the innovation and evolution of features happen at a rapid pace. Besides the core development team around Sage Weil at Red Hat, industry heavyweights such as Intel, SanDisk, Fujitsu, and Suse, as well as countless other individuals, have made substantial contributions. As a result, the project continues to mature both in capability and stability; the latter playing a key role in enterprise deployments. Many features and components that are now a part of Ceph were only in their infancy when Learning Ceph, Packt Publishing, came out; erasure encoding, optimized performance for SSDs, and the Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) are just a couple of examples. All of these are covered in great detail in this new book that you are holding in your hands right now.
The other day, I read a blog where the author likened the significance of Ceph to the storage industry to the impact that Linux had on operating systems. While it is still too early to make that call, its adoption in the industry speaks for itself, with multi-petabyte-sized deployments becoming more and more common. Large-scale users such as CERN and Yahoo are regularly sharing their experiences with the community.
The wealth of capabilities and the enormous flexibility to adapt to a wide range of use cases can sometimes make it difficult to approach this new technology, and it can leave new users wondering where to start their learning journeys. Not everybody has access to massive data centers with thousands of servers and disks to experiment and build their own experiences. Karan's new book, Ceph Cookbook, Packt Publishing, is meant to help by providing practical, hands-on advice for the many challenges you will encounter.
As a long-time Ceph enthusiast, I have worked with Karan for several years and congratulate him on his passion and initiative to compile a comprehensive guide for first-time users of Ceph. It will be a useful guide to those embarking on deploying the open source community version of Ceph.
This book complements the more technical documentation and collateral developed by members of the Ceph community, filling in the gaps with useful commentary and advice for new users.
If you are downloading the Ceph community version, kicking its tires, and trying it out at home or on your non-mission-critical workloads in the enterprise, this book is for you. Expect to learn to deploy and manage Ceph step by step along with tips and use cases for deploying Ceph's features and functionality on certain storage workloads.
Now, it's time to begin reading about the ingredients you'll need to cook up your own Ceph software-defined storage deployment. But hurry— the new exciting features, such as production-ready CephFS and support for containers, are already in the pipeline, and I am looking forward to seeing Karan's next book in another year from now.
Dr. Wolfgang Schulze
Director of Global Storage Consulting, Red Hat