One solution to making the installation and management of Ceph easier is to use an orchestration tool. There are several tools available, such as Puppet, Chef, Salt, and Ansible, all of which have Ceph modules available. If you are already using an orchestration tool in your environment, then it would be recommended that you stick to using that tool. For the purposes of this book, Ansible will be used; this is for a number of reasons:
- It's the favored deployment method of Red Hat, who are the owners of both the Ceph and Ansible projects
- It has a well-developed and mature set of Ceph roles and playbooks
- Ansible tends to be easier to learn if you have never used an orchestration tool before
- It doesn't require a central server to be set up, which means demonstrations are more focused on using the tool rather than installing it
All tools follow the same principle of where you provide them with...