Welcome to Learn Ceph, a fully open-source, beginner-to-advanced guide to mastering the Ceph Distributed Storage System. Whether you're a system administrator, DevOps engineer, or a storage enthusiast — this repository will help you understand, install, configure, monitor, and scale Ceph like a pro. 🚀
- 📖 What is Ceph?
- ✨ Features
- 🧱 Ceph Architecture
- ⚙️ Installation
- 🛠️ Configuration
- 💻 Common Ceph Commands
- 📊 Monitoring
- 📦 Use Cases
- 📘 Tutorials
- 📌 FAQs
- 🤝 Contributing
Ceph is a highly scalable, open-source distributed storage system designed to provide reliable, unified storage for large-scale data. It allows you to store block, object, and file data in a single platform with high performance, fault tolerance, and no single point of failure.
| Storage Type | Description |
|---|---|
| Object Storage (RADOS Gateway) | Similar to Amazon S3. Ideal for cloud-native apps. |
| Block Storage (RBD) | Virtual hard disks. Common in virtual machines or databases. |
| File System (CephFS) | Traditional file storage with POSIX-compliant interface. |
Ceph is like a smart, self-managing warehouse for your data. Whether you're storing files (like Dropbox), blocks (like hard drives), or objects (like cloud backups), Ceph organizes and manages everything across multiple servers, automatically balancing the load and making copies to ensure nothing is lost—even if hardware fails.
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| 🔄 Scalability | Grows from GBs to multi-PB seamlessly |
| 🔧 Unified Storage | Block, Object, and File storage in one platform |
| 🛠 Self-healing | Automatically recovers from hardware or disk failures |
| 🧠 Intelligent Clustering | Uses CRUSH algorithm for data placement without bottlenecks |
| 🔐 High Availability | No single point of failure, supports replication and erasure coding |
| 💻 Open Source | Backed by a large community and enterprise-ready (Red Hat Ceph, etc.) |
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Cloud Infrastructure (OpenStack, Kubernetes storage backend)
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Big Data Analytics (reliable storage for Hadoop/Spark)
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Backup & Archiving (object storage with S3 APIs)
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Web Hosting & Streaming (serving large files efficiently)
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Enterprise Virtualization (block storage for VMs)
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You have multiple servers with disks.
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Ceph groups these disks into a cluster.
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When you save data, Ceph automatically:
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Splits the data into chunks
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Stores those chunks on different servers
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Keeps redundant copies
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Tracks everything using a CRUSH algorithm for fast access
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Ceph’s architecture consists of the following components:
| Component | Description |
|---|---|
| MON (Monitor) | Maintains cluster map and health |
| MGR (Manager) | Provides dashboard and monitoring |
| OSD (Object Storage Daemon) | Stores actual data on disk |
| MDS (Metadata Server) | Manages metadata for CephFS |
| Client Interfaces | RBD, RGW (S3), CephFS for applications |
📖 Detailed Architecture Guide →
You can deploy Ceph in multiple ways. We provide detailed, step-by-step guides for each:
- 🔧 Deploy using Cephadm (Recommended) – Production-ready and simple
- 🧰 Install on Bare Metal (Manual Setup) – Full control
- 🐳 Install Ceph using Docker Compose – Ideal for testing
📌 Minimum Requirements:
- Linux OS (Ubuntu/CentOS)
- 2+ CPUs, 4GB+ RAM per node
- SSD/HDD for OSDs
- Proper network configuration
Ceph is highly configurable. This section covers essential configurations:
Each topic includes examples, diagrams, and best practices.
Examples:
ceph status
ceph osd tree
ceph df
ceph health detail
Monitoring is essential for understanding the performance and health of your Ceph cluster. Ceph provides several built-in and third-party tools for visualization and alerting.
| Tool | Description |
|---|---|
| Ceph Dashboard | Built-in web-based UI for monitoring cluster |
| Prometheus | Metrics collection and alerting |
| Grafana | Visualize Ceph metrics from Prometheus |
| Alertmanager | Define and route alerts |
# Enable Prometheus module
ceph mgr module enable prometheus
# Export metrics endpoint (default: 9283)
curl http://<ceph-mgr>:9283/metrics📘 For detailed setup: /monitoring-and-alerting/overview.md
Ceph is highly flexible and supports multiple real-world use cases across various industries:
| Use Case | Description |
|---|---|
| 📦 Block Storage | Persistent volumes using RBD in Kubernetes/OpenStack |
| 🌐 Object Storage | S3-compatible storage with RADOS Gateway (RGW) |
| 📁 File Storage | Distributed file system with CephFS |
- S3 & Swift-compatible API
- Ideal for backups, logs, media assets
- Persistent volumes for VMs & containers
- Integration with OpenStack & Kubernetes
- POSIX-compliant distributed file system
- Suitable for HPC, AI/ML workloads
- Hybrid-cloud deployments
- Scalable archival & video surveillance storage
💡 Did you know? Leading platforms like OpenStack, Kubernetes, and SUSE use Ceph as their backend storage solution.
Want hands-on experience? Check out these guides:
- 🏗️ Ceph Architecture Overview
- ⚙️ Ceph Installation & Deployment Guide
- 🖥️ Ceph Configuration in Depth
- 🤖 Ceph (CLI) & Troubleshooting Reference
- 📡 Ceph Monitoring & Alerting Guide
🎓 More coming soon: CephFS snapshots, Multi-site RGW, Ceph on Kubernetes, etc.
Each tutorial includes:
- Prerequisites
- Step-by-step instructions
- Validation steps
At least 3 MONs and 3 OSDs are recommended for quorum and redundancy.
✅ Yes. With tools like cephadm and containers, even a single-node deployment is possible.
Depends on use case. Ceph is more feature-rich and scalable
Ceph uses data replication (or erasure coding) and automatic rebalancing to maintain availability even after hardware failure.
Absolutely. Ceph integrates well via Rook, CSI drivers, and RBD/NFS backends for dynamic provisioning.
Ceph uses replication or erasure coding based on pool configuration
Yes, but 3+ nodes are recommended even for dev/testing
We welcome contributions from the community! 🚀
- Fork this repository
- Create a new branch:
git checkout -b feature/your-feature - Make your changes
- Submit a Pull Request
Made with ❤️ by Suman Pal | Ceph ❤️ Open Source