One solution to make installing and managing Ceph easier is to use an orchestration tool. There are several tools available, such as Puppet, Chef, Salt, and Ansible, all of which have Ceph modules available. If you are already using an orchestration tool in your environment, then it is recommended that you stick to using that tool. For the purposes of this book, Ansible will be used. This is due a number of reasons, as follows:
- It's the deployment method that is favored by Red Hat, who are the owners of both the Ceph and Ansible projects
- It has a well-developed, mature set of Ceph roles and playbooks
- Ansible tends to be easier to learn if you have never used an orchestration tool before
- It doesn't require a central server to be set up, which means demonstrations are more focused on using the tool than installing it
All tools follow the same principle...
