Ceph client components

Ceph clients differ materially in how they present data storage interfaces. A Ceph Block Device presents block storage that mounts just like a physical storage drive. A Ceph gateway presents an object storage service with S3-compliant and Swift-compliant RESTful interfaces with its own user management. However, all Ceph clients use the Reliable Autonomic Distributed Object Store (RADOS) protocol to interact with the IBM Storage Ceph cluster.

Ceph clients all have the same basic needs:

• The Ceph configuration file, and the Ceph monitor address.
• The pool name.
• The user name and the path to the secret key.

Ceph clients tend to follow some similar patterns, such as object-watch-notify and striping. The following sections describe a little bit more about RADOS, librados and common patterns used in Ceph clients.