In this book, we have discussed deploying Ceph in multiple ways, which includes using Ceph-deploy and the Virtual Storage Manager (VSM). Both of these methods require the manual installation and configuration of the Ceph cluster. However, there exist other tools and methods that can install and deploy Ceph for you in a highly automated fashion. With such tools, you no longer need to type boring commands to deploy Ceph; configuration management tools such as Ansible, Puppet, and Chef, among others, can install and configure the Ceph cluster as you like.
In this recipe, we will go through Ansible, which is a very simple IT automation and configuration management tool; for more information on Ansible, take a look at http://www.ansible.com/how-ansible-works. The Ceph ecosystem has a vibrant community around it that has developed ready-to-use Ansible modules for Ceph. We will be using these
ceph-ansible
modules (refer to https://github.com/ceph/ceph-ansible...