Foreword

Since Ceph's inception and posting to GitHub in 2008, Sage Weil’s creation has grown from an inpidual idea to a successful open source project with over 87,000 commits from almost 900 different contributors from dozens of companies. Originally incubated as a skunkworks project inside DreamHost, an earlier Sage startup focused on web hosting. In 2012, it was spun off into a new company, Inktank, dedicated to focusing exclusively on the development and support of Ceph. Inktank’s reputation was built upon the stellar customer support its employees provided, from on-site installation and configuration, to highly complex bug troubleshooting, through patch development, and ultimate problem resolution. The DNA of the company was a dedication to customer success, even when it required a senior developer to join a customer support teleconference at short notice, or even Sage himself to remotely log in to a server and assist in diagnosing the root cause of an issue.

This focus on the customer was elevated even further after Inktank’s acquisition by Red Hat in 2014. If Red Hat is known for anything, it’s for making CIOs comfortable with open source software. Members of Red Hat’s customer experience and engagement team are some of the most talented inpiduals I’ve had the pleasure to work with. They possess the unique ability to blend the technical troubleshooting skills necessary to support a complex distributed storage system with the soft relational skills required to be on the front lines engaging with a customer, who in many cases is in an extremely stressful situation where production clusters are out of operation.

The authors of this book are two of the finest exemplars of this unique crossing of streams. Inside this work, Vikhyat and Michael share some of their hard-earned best practices in successfully installing, configuring, and supporting a Ceph cluster. Vikhyat has 9 years of experience providing sustaining engineering support for distributed storage products with a focus on Ceph for over 3 years. Michael has been working in the storage industry for over 12 years and has been focused on Ceph for close to 3 years. They both have the uncommon ability to calmly work through complex customer escalations, providing a first class experience with Ceph under even the most stressful of situations. Between the two of them, you’re in good hands—the ones that have seen some of the hairiest, most difficult-to-diagnose problems and have come out the other side to share their hard-earned wisdom with you.

If there’s been one frequent critique of Ceph over the years, it’s been that it’s too complex for a typical administrator to work with. Our hope is that the ones who might be intimidated by the thought of setting up their first Ceph cluster will find comfort and gain confidence from reading this book. After all, there’s no time like the present to start playing with The Future of Storage?. :-)

Ian R. Colle

Global Director of Software Engineering, Red Hat Ceph Storage