New since the first edition

The Jewel LTS release brought a number of significant changes:

• Unified queue of client I/O, recovery, scrubs, and snapshot trimming
• Daemons now run as the ceph user, which must be addressed when upgrading
• Cache tier improvements
• SHEC erasure coding is no longer experimental
• The SWIFT API now supports object expiration
• RBD improvements (now supports suffixes)
• rbd du shows actual and provisioned usage quickly via object-map and fast-diff features
• New rbd status command
• deep-flatten now handles snapshots
• CephFS snapshots can now be renamed
• And CephFS is considered stable!
• Scrubbing improvements
• TCMalloc improvements
• Multisite functionality in RGW significantly improved
• OpenStack Keystone v3 support
• Swift per-tenant namespace
• Async RBD mirroring
• A new look for ceph status

As we write, the major Luminous LTS release has just reached general availability. Early experiences are positive and it is the best choice for new deployments. Much-anticipated features in Luminous include:

• The BlueStore back end is supported
• In-line compression and read checksums
• Erasure coding for RBD volumes
• Better tools for uniform OSD utilization
• Improved tools for the OSD lifecycle
• Enhanced CLI
• Multiple active CephFS MDS servers are supported