Ceph at Open World Forum and OpenStack Summit

As Ceph development continues to move forward at an astonishing rate we’re working hard to share both our passion for what’s here and our vision of things to come via as many conduits as we can manage. If you are interested in hearing about the latest Ceph dev work, asking questions of some of the folks behind it, or just want to tell us the awesome things you are building with Ceph, keep an eye on our marathon event schedule and stop on by.

In the immediate future you can find us both at the Open World Forum coming up this week in Paris and next week at the newly streamlined OpenStack Summit in San Diego.

Open World Forum ¶

In Paris Ross Turk will be speaking on several panels. For those of you who don’t know Ross, any presentation from this seasoned Open Source veteran is well worth the time away from precious bits and/or internet cat pictures, so make sure you catch all of his appearances! Ross will be delivering both of the following talks:

The Dangers of Apathetic Abstraction

What began as a vague shape on a diagram (indicating something so incomprehensibly vast the diagrammer decided against trying to draw it) has changed everything. Yesterday, the network was out of your control and too complicated to understand; now your entire operation is. But one thing hasn’t changed: people don’t care how it works, just that it continues to.

Every day, scores of excited entrepreneurs build new companies on cloud infrastructure without a second thought. Every day, established companies relinquish their data centers. The reason is clear: it’s far easier to build something amazing when you can stop paying attention to what makes large portions of it work.

Abstraction is not having to worry how underlying technology functions; apathetic abstraction is not caring. This session will provide a discussion about the danger of relying on something you don’t control and don’t understand.

DreamObjects: Using Ceph To Build Open Cloud Services

Last month, US-based hosting provider DreamHost announced the public beta of DreamObjects, a inexpensive, scalable, reliable object storage service for web and application developers. DreamObjects is built upon Ceph, an open source storage platform designed for reliability, performance, and scalability.

DreamHost runs Ceph on everyday Linux servers, transforming three petabytes of commodity disks into an elastic, self-managing object store. Ceph works with applications written for S3 and Swift, allowing users to migrate applications seamlessly to DreamObjects.

In this talk, attendees will be introduced to the Ceph distributed storage platform and learn what makes it unique. The session will also provide insight into the design and operation of DreamObjects, the world’s largest deployment of Ceph to date.

OpenStack Summit ¶

The OpenStack Summit will feature one of the core developers on Ceph, Josh Durgin. Lately Josh has been working on the Ceph RBD (RADOS block device) as well as how that intersects with OpenStack’s Cinder. To hear more about Josh’s epic code slinging make sure you stop by for his talk:

Storing VMs with Cinder and Ceph RBD.

Ceph is an open source distributed object store, network block device, and file system. Ceph can be used for object storage through its S3-compatible REST interface. It can also provide storage for network block devices, with the thin provisioning and copy-on-write cloning features necessary to support large-scale virtualization. With the Folsom release, Cinder makes block storage for backing VMs a first class feature in OpenStack. Block devices can be created from images stored in Glance, and with RBD behind both, new VMs can be created faster while using less space. This session will cover the current status of the integration, and discuss the technical implications and the advantages of block storage within the OpenStack cloud operating system.

If you are attending either Open World Forum or the OpenStack Summit you’ll definitely want to catch all the tidbits from the Inktank crew.