Vision

The future of storage is open.

Ceph's vision is simple: every storage problem should be solvable with open source software. One platform for object, block, and file storage that runs on any hardware, scales to any size, and belongs to no single vendor.

That vision now drives a new generation of Ceph: rebuilt for flash, native to Kubernetes, and steered in the open by the community that depends on it.

Next-generation performance

Storage hardware has been transformed: NVMe drives serve millions of I/O operations per second, networks move hundreds of gigabits, and CPUs gain cores faster than software can use them. Ceph is being rebuilt so that open source storage leads on this hardware, rather than merely running on it.

Crimson and Seastore

Crimson is Ceph's next-generation OSD, rebuilt from the ground up on the Seastar framework: a shared-nothing, one-thread-per-core design that keeps work on the CPU core that owns it and avoids the locks, context switches, and kernel overhead that limit today's storage daemons.

Crimson shipped its first technology preview in the Squid release, and Tentacle added Seastore, Crimson's purpose-built object store designed for flash rather than spinning disks. The goal is a drop-in replacement for the classic OSD: speaking the same librados protocol, joining the same clusters, with Seastore as its native backend.

Explore the Crimson project Read the early Crimson benchmarks

Faster with every release

The performance push spans the whole platform. The Tentacle (v20) release introduced fast erasure coding, making erasure-coded pools a practical choice for block and file workloads, alongside a faster BlueStore write-ahead log and improved compression.

Ceph's NVMe over TCP gateway presents block storage to any standard NVMe initiator: highly available, SAN-style access over ordinary Ethernet with no proprietary hardware. And the community keeps proving what open source can do at scale, including a 10-petabyte all-flash cluster sustaining a terabyte per second.

How Ceph reached 1 TiB/s Fast erasure coding in Tentacle

Cloud-native storage

Modern infrastructure is built on Kubernetes, and Ceph is built to live there: deployed, managed, and consumed through the same APIs as the platforms it serves.

Native to Kubernetes

Rook, a graduated Cloud Native Computing Foundation project, is the Ceph documentation's preferred way to run Ceph on Kubernetes: an operator that deploys, configures, and manages entire clusters through Kubernetes APIs. The Ceph CSI driver provisions block and file volumes for workloads dynamically, with snapshots, cloning, and volume expansion built in.

Beyond Kubernetes, cephadm deploys and manages every Ceph daemon in containers: the same declarative, self-managing operational model from bare metal to cloud. Wherever your platform runs, Ceph runs the way your platform expects.

Cloud-native resources

  • Rook

    The Kubernetes operator for Ceph: production-ready orchestration of file, block, and object storage. Visit rook.io to get started.

  • Ceph CSI

    Dynamic provisioning of RBD and CephFS volumes for Kubernetes workloads, maintained in the open on GitHub.

  • Block storage for containers

    See how RBD backs Kubernetes volumes in the documentation, or read about all three storage interfaces on the technology page.

Democratizing storage

Ceph exists to do for storage what Linux did for computing: turn essential infrastructure into open technology that anyone can use, study, improve, and operate at any scale.

Open by design

Ceph runs on commodity hardware from any vendor, is licensed as free and open source software, and is developed entirely in public. There is no proprietary edition, no locked feature tier, and no exit penalty: the code powering the largest research and cloud clusters in the world is the same code anyone can download today.

"A guiding vision for Ceph is to be the state of the art for reliable, scale-out storage, and to do so with 100% open source."

Sage Weil, Ceph creator, at the founding of the Ceph Foundation

A neutral home

The Ceph Foundation, a directed fund under the Linux Foundation since 2018, gives the project a neutral home. The Foundation supports the community with funding, events, and outreach, while technical direction stays with the community itself through the Ceph Steering Committee and its elected Executive Council.

From academic research clusters to hyperscale cloud infrastructure, organizations worldwide use Ceph to break free from proprietary storage constraints.

See Ceph in action Meet the Foundation members

An open roadmap

Ceph's future is not decided behind closed doors. It is planned, debated, and built in public, and anyone can take part.

How Ceph moves forward

A new named stable release ships roughly every year, and each series is supported for about two years. The current stable release is Tentacle (v20), and the next, Umbrella, is already in development.

Each cycle begins with the Ceph Developer Summit, where contributors plan the next release component by component. Open developer calls, the public issue tracker, and component boards on GitHub carry that plan through the year, in full view of the community.

Follow and shape the roadmap

  • Roadmap

    The trackers and project boards the community plans with, collected on the roadmap page.

  • Contribute

    Your first patch, the developer calls, and how review works: start on the contribute page.

  • Mailing lists

    Development discussion happens in the open on the dev mailing list.

  • Events

    Ceph Days, developer summits, and meetups around the world are listed on the events page.

Discover more

  • Technology

    Object, block, and file storage built on RADOS: see how CRUSH placement, self-healing, and unified storage interfaces work under the hood.

    See how Ceph works

  • Use cases

    Businesses, academic institutions, global organizations and more streamline their data storage and scale to the exabyte level with Ceph.

    See how Ceph is used

  • Community

    Join the developers and operators building the future of open source storage: events, mailing lists, chat channels, and more.

    Meet the Ceph community