Preface

Ceph, a unified, highly resilient, distributed storage system that provides block, object, and file access, has enjoyed a surge in popularity over the last few years. Due to being open source, Ceph has enjoyed rapid adoption both from developers and end users alike, with several well-known corporations being involved in the project. With every new release, the scale of its performance and feature set continues to grow, further enhancing Ceph's status.

With the current ever-increasing data storage requirements and challenges faced by legacy RAID-based systems, Ceph is well placed to offer an answer to these problems. As the world moves forward adopting new cloud technologies and object-based storage, Ceph is ready and waiting to be the driving force as part of the new era of storage technologies.

In this book, we will cover a wide variety of topics, from installing and managing a Ceph cluster to how to recover from disasters, should you ever find yourself in that situation. For those that have interest in getting their applications to talk directly to Ceph, this book will also show you how to develop applications that make use of Ceph's libraries and even how to perform distributed computing by inserting your own code into Ceph. By the end of this book, you will be well on your way to mastering Ceph.