Keynote by Sage Weil, Red Hat

1. Ceph: one decade in
Sage Weil

4. RESEARCH

5. RESEARCH INCUBATION

6. RESEARCH INCUBATION INKTANK

7. Research beginnings
7

8. RESEARCH

9. UCSC research grant
● “Petascale object storage”
● DOE: LANL, LLNL, Sandia
● Scalability, reliability, performance
● HPC file system workloads
● Scalable metadata management
● First line of Ceph code
● Summer internship at LLNL
● High security national lab environment
● Could write anything, as long as it was OSS

10. The rest of Ceph
● RADOS – distributed object storage cluster (2005)
● EBOFS – local object storage (2004/2006)
● CRUSH – hashing for the real world (2005)
● Paxos monitors – cluster consensus (2006)
→ emphasis on consistent, reliable storage
→ scale by pushing intelligence to the edges
→ a different but compelling architecture

12. Industry black hole
● Many large storage vendors
● Proprietary solutions that don't scale well
● Few open source alternatives (2006)
● Very limited scale, or
● Limited community and architecture (Lustre)
● No enterprise feature sets (snapshots, quotas)
● PhD grads all built interesting systems...
● ...and then went to work for Netapp, DDN, EMC, Veritas.
● They want you, not your project

13. A different path?
● Change the storage world with open source
● Do what Linux did to Solaris, Irix, Ultrix, etc.
● License
● LGPL: share changes, okay to link to proprietary code
● Avoid unfriendly practices
● Dual licensing
● Copyright assignment
● Platform
● Remember sourceforge.net?

14. Incubation
14

15. RESEARCH INCUBATION

16. DreamHost!
● Move back to LA, continue hacking
● Hired a few developers
● Pure development
● No deliverables

17. Ambitious feature set
● Native Linux kernel client (2007-)
● Per-directory snapshots (2008)
● Recursive accounting (2008)
● Object classes (2009)
● librados (2009)
● radosgw (2009)
● strong authentication (2009)
● RBD: rados block device (2010)

18. The kernel client
● ceph-fuse was limited, not very fast
● Build native Linux kernel implementation
● Began attending Linux file system developer events
(LSF)
● Early words of encouragement from ex-Lustre dev
● Engage Linux fs developer community as peer
● Initial attempts merge rejected by Linus
● Not sufficient evidence of user demand
● A few fans and would-be users chimed in...
● Eventually merged for v2.6.34 (early 2010)

19. Part of a larger ecosystem
● Ceph need not solve all problems as monolithic
stack
● Replaced ebofs object file system with btrfs
● Same design goals; avoid reinventing the wheel
● Robust, supported, well-optimized
● Kernel-level cache management
● Copy-on-write, checksumming, other goodness
● Contributed some early functionality
● Cloning files
● Async snapshots

20. Budding community
● #ceph on irc.oftc.net, ceph-devel@vger.kernel.org
● Many interested users
● A few developers
● Many fans
● Too unstable for any real deployments
● Still mostly focused on right architecture and
technical solutions

21. Road to product
● DreamHost decides to build an S3-compatible
object storage service with Ceph
● Stability
● Focus on core RADOS, RBD, radosgw
● Paying back some technical debt
● Build testing automation
● Code review!
● Expand engineering team

22. The reality
● Growing incoming commercial interest
● Early attempts from organizations large and small
● Difficult to engage with a web hosting company
● No means to support commercial deployments
● Project needed a company to back it
● Fund the engineering effort
● Build and test a product
● Support users
● Orchestrated a spin out of DreamHost in 2012

23. Inktank
23

24. RESEARCH INCUBATION INKTANK

25. Do it right
● How do we build a strong open source company?
● How do we build a strong open source community?
● Models?
● Red Hat, SUSE, Cloudera, MySQL, Canonical, …
● Initial funding from DreamHost, Mark
Shuttleworth

26. Goals
● A stable Ceph release for production deployment
● DreamObjects
● Lay foundation for widespread adoption
● Platform support (Ubuntu, Red Hat, SUSE)
● Documentation
● Build and test infrastructure
● Build a sales and support organization
● Expand engineering organization

27. Branding
● Early decision to engage professional agency
● Terms like
● “Brand core”
● “Design system”
● Company vs Project
● Inktank != Ceph
● Establish a healthy relationship with the community
● Aspirational messaging: The Future of Storage

28. Slick graphics
● broken powerpoint template 28

29. Traction
● Too many production deployments to count
● We don't know about most of them!
● Too many customers (for me) to count
● Growing partner list
● Lots of buzz
● OpenStack

30. Quality
● Increased adoption means increased demands on
robust testing
● Across multiple platforms
● Include platforms we don't use
● Upgrades
● Rolling upgrades
● Inter-version compatibility

31. Developer community
● Significant external contributors
● First-class feature contributions from contributors
● Non-Inktank participants in daily stand-ups
● External access to build/test lab infrastructure
● Common toolset
● Github
● Email (kernel.org)
● IRC (oftc.net)
● Linux distros

32. CDS: Ceph Developer Summit
● Community process for building project roadmap
● 100% online
● Google hangouts
● Wikis
● Etherpad
● First was in Spring 2013, sixth is coming up
● (Continuing to) indoctrinate our own developers to
an open development model

33. And then...
s/Red Hat of Storage/Storage of Red Hat/

34. Calamari
● Inktank strategy was to package Ceph for the
Enterprise
● Inktank Ceph Enterprise (ICE)
● Ceph: a hardened, tested, validated version
● Calamari: management layer and GUI (proprietary!)
● Enterprise integrations: SNMP, HyperV, VMWare
● Support SLAs
● Red Hat model is pure open source
● Open sourced Calamari

35. The Present
35

36. Tiering
● Client side caches are great, but only buy so much.
● Can we separate hot and cold data onto different
storage devices?
● Cache pools: promote hot objects from an existing pool
into a fast (e.g., FusionIO) pool
● Cold pools: demote cold data to a slow, archival pool (e.g.,
erasure coding, NYI)
● Very Cold Pools (efficient erasure coding, compression, osd
spin down to save power) OR tape/public cloud
● How do you identify what is hot and cold?
● Common in enterprise solutions; not found in open
source scale-out systems
→ cache pools new in Firefly, better in Giant

37. Erasure coding
● Replication for redundancy is flexible and fast
● For larger clusters, it can be expensive
● We can trade recovery performance for storage
Storage
overhead
Repair
traffic
● Erasure coded data is hard to modify, but ideal for
cold or read-only objects
● Cold storage tiering
● Will be used directly by radosgw
MTTDL
(days)
3x replication 3x 1x 2.3 E10
RS (10, 4) 1.4x 10x 3.3 E13
LRC (10, 6, 5) 1.6x 5x 1.2 E15

38. Erasure coding (cont'd)
● In firefly
● LRC in Giant
● Intel ISA-L (optimized library) in Giant, maybe
backported to Firefly
● Talk of ARM optimized (NEON) jerasure

39. Async Replication in RADOS
● Clinic project with Harvey Mudd College
● Group of students working on real world project
● Reason about bounds on clock drift so we can
achieve point-in-time consistency across a
distributed set of nodes

40. CephFS
● Dogfooding for internal QA infrastructure
● Learning lots
● Many rough edges, but working quite well!
● We want to hear from you!

41. The Future
41

42. CephFS
→ This is where it all started – let's get there
● Today
● QA coverage and bug squashing continues
● NFS and CIFS now large complete and robust
● Multi-MDS stability continues to improve
● Need
● QA investment
● Snapshot work
● Amazing community effort

43. The larger ecosystem

44. Storage backends
● Backends are pluggable
● Recent work to use rocksdb everywhere leveldb
can be used (mon/osd); can easily plug in other
key/value store libraries
● Other possibilities include LMDB or NVNKV (from
fusionIO)
● Prototype kinetic backend
● Alternative OSD backends
● KeyValueStore – put all data in a k/v db (Haomai @
UnitedStack)
● KeyFileStore initial plans (2nd gen?)
● Some partners looking at backends tuned to their
hardware

45. Governance
How do we strengthen the project community?
● Recognize project leads
● RBD, RGW, RADOS, CephFS, Calamari, etc.
● Formalize processes around CDS, community
roadmap
● Formal foundation?
● Community build and test lab infrastructure
● Build and test for broad range of OSs, distros, hardware

46. Technical roadmap
● How do we reach new use-cases and users?
● How do we better satisfy existing users?
● How do we ensure Ceph can succeed in enough
markets for business investment to thrive?
● Enough breadth to expand and grow the
community
● Enough focus to do well

47. Performance
● Lots of work with partners to improve performance
● High-end flash back ends. Optimize hot paths to
limit CPU usage, drive up IOPS
● Improve threading, fine-grained locks
● Low-power processors. Run well on small ARM
devices (including those new-fangled ethernet
drives)

48. Ethernet Drives
● Multiple vendors are building 'ethernet drives'
● Normal hard drives w/ small ARM host on board
● Could run OSD natively on the drive, completely
remove the “host” from the deployment
● Many different implementations, some vendors need help
w/ open architecture and ecosystem concepts
● Current devices are hard disks; no reason they
couldn't also be flash-based, or hybrid
● This is exactly what we were thinking when Ceph
was originally designed!

49. Big data?
● Hadoop map/reduce built on a weak “file system”
model
● s/HDFS/CephFS/
● It is easier to move computation than data
● RADOS “classes” allow computation to be moved to
storage nodes
● New “methods” (beyond read/write) for your “objects”
● Simple sandbox, very extensible
● Still looking for killer use-case

50. Archival storage
● Erasure coding makes storage cost compelling
● Especially when combined with ethernet drives
● Already do background scrubbing, repair
● Data integrity
● Yes: over the wire
● Yes: at rest (...for erasure coded content)
● Yes: background scrubbing
● Still need end-to-end verification

51. The enterprise
How do we pay for all our toys?
● Support legacy and transitional interfaces
● iSCSI, NFS, pNFS, CIFS
● Vmware, Hyper-v
● Identify the beachhead use-cases
● Only takes one use-case to get in the door
● Single platform – shared storage resource
● Bottom-up: earn respect of engineers and admins
● Top-down: strong brand and compelling product

52. Why we can beat the old guard
● Strong foundational architecture
● It is hard to compete with free and open source
software
● Unbeatable value proposition
● Ultimately a more efficient development model
● It is hard to manufacture community
● Native protocols, Linux kernel support
● Unencumbered by legacy protocols like NFS
● Move beyond traditional client/server model
● Ongoing paradigm shift
● Software defined infrastructure, data center

53. Thanks!