Summary

Storage provisioning is the most important operation an administrator performs on their systems. Unlike clunky traditional enterprise storage systems, we don't have to procure, manage, maintain, and support multiple storage systems for different storage modalities. Ceph uniquely delivers object, block, and file storage from a single unified back end. So far we have learned how to configure and provision RADOS block devices, CephFS filesystems, and Ceph object storage. The familiar block device and filesystem storage abstractions have existed for decades now; object storage however is relatively new and is gaining momentum due to the popularity and flexibility of the Amazon S3 and OpenStack Swift services which Ceph supports right out of the box.