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What's new in Ceph

Well Kept

Article from ADMIN 77/2023

By Martin Loschwitz

Ceph and its core component RADOS have recently undergone a number of technical and organizational changes. We take a closer look at the benefits that the move to containers, the new setup, and other feature improvements offer.

Ceph and its core component RADOS are considered a prime example of an open source object store implementation that has earned a reputation as a reliable piece of software that need not fear competition with proprietary and commercial offerings. Some observers tend to forget the quite extensive history of the environment. In the eyes of many, Ceph is still quite young, even though it has been around for more than 15 years and has been marketed commercially for more than 10 years. The software is by no means a newcomer; quite the opposite, it is well established.

Ceph has not been quiet. To this day, developers continue to surprise users with an explosion of features in a relatively short time, which is reason enough to take a closer look at what has been happening at Ceph in recent weeks and months – both in terms of the people working on Ceph and of the product itself. What new options are available to administrators today, compared with slightly older Ceph versions, such as Nautilus, and how can administrators benefit from those innovations and improvements?

Step by Step Takeover

Somewhat uncharacteristically, I start with the organizational aspects behind the scenes at Ceph, because at least as much has changed there recently as on the technical side. The reason is obvious: After Red Hat swallowed the erstwhile Ceph provider Inktank several years ago, the company initially continued to run as a company within a company. This approach was not unusual for Red Hat. Several times in the past, Red Hat has not integrated companies into its own organizational structure immediately after acquisition, and for good reason.

After the acquisition of Inktank, Red Hat would have had virtually no teams into which Inktank could have been integrated. Some structures in the company were streamlined over the years; for example, parts of the sales department formally moved from Inktank to Red

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