Ceph Intro & Architectural Overview

Ceph is a free software storage platform designed to present object, block, and file storage from a single distributed computer cluster. Ceph’s main goals are to be completely distributed without a single point of failure, scalable to the exabyte level, and freely-available. The data is replicated, making it fault tolerant. Ceph software runs on commodity hardware. The system is designed to be both self-healing and self-managing and strives to reduce both administrator and budget overhead. Ceph employs four distinct kinds of daemons:[4] Cluster monitors (ceph-mon) that keep track of active and failed cluster nodes Metadata servers (ceph-mds) that store the metadata of inodes and directories Object storage devices (ceph-osd) that actually store the content of files. Ideally, OSDs store their data on a local btrfs filesystem to leverage its built-in copy-on-write capabilities, though other local filesystems can be used instead.[5] Representational state transfer (RESTful) gateways (ceph-rgw) that expose the