11. UCSC research grant
“Petascale object storage”
US Dept of Energy: LANL, LLNL, Sandia
Scalability
Reliability
Performance
Raw IO bandwidth, metadata ops/sec
HPC file system workloads
Thousands of clients writing to same file, directory
12. Distributed metadata management
Innovative design
Subtree-based partitioning for locality, efficiency
Dynamically adapt to current workload
Embedded inodes
Prototype simulator in Java (2004)
First line of Ceph code
Summer internship at LLNL
High security national lab environment
Could write anything, as long as it was OSS
13. 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
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15. 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
16. A different path
Change the world with open source
Do what Linux did to Solaris, Irix, Ultrix, etc.
What could go wrong?
License
GPL, BSD...
LGPL: share changes, okay to link to proprietary code
Avoid community un-friendly practices
No dual licensing
No copyright assignment
21. 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 devs
Engage Linux fs developer community as peer
Eventually merged CephFS client for v2.6.34 (early 2010)
RBD client merged in 2011
22. Part of a larger ecosystem
Ceph need not solve all problems as monolithic stack
Replaced ebofs object file system with btrfs
Same design goals
Robust, well optimized
Kernel-level cache management
Copy-on-write, checksumming, other goodness
Contributed some early functionality
Cloning files
Async snapshots
23. 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
24. 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
25. 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
Bryan built a framework to spin out of DreamHost
28. Do it right
How do we build a strong open source company?
How do we build a strong open source community?
Models?
RedHat, Cloudera, MySQL, Canonical, …
Initial funding from DreamHost, Mark Shuttleworth
29. Goals
A stable Ceph release for production deployment
DreamObjects
Lay foundation for widespread adoption
Platform support (Ubuntu, Redhat, SuSE)
Documentation
Build and test infrastructure
Build a sales and support organization
Expand engineering organization
30. Branding
Early decision to engage professional agency
MetaDesign
Terms like
“Brand core”
“Design system”
Keep project and company independent
Inktank != Ceph
The Future of Storage
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broken powerpoint template
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34. Traction
Too many production deployments to count
We don't know about most of them!
Too many customers (for me) to count
Expansive partner list
Lots of inbound
Lots of press and buzz
35. Quality
Increased adoption means increased demands on robust
testing
Across multiple platforms
Upgrades
Rolling upgrades
Inter-version compatibility
36. Developer community
Significant external contributors
Many full-time contributors outside of Inktank
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
37. CDS: Ceph Developer Summit
Community process for building project roadmap
100% online
Google hangouts
Wikis
Etherpad
Quarterly
Our 4th
CDS next week
Great participation
Ongoing indoctrination of Inktank engineers to open
development model
38. Erasure coding
Replication for redundancy is flexible and fast
For larger clusters, it can be expensive
Erasure coded data is hard to modify, but ideal for cold or
read-only objects
Will be used directly by radosgw
Coexists with new tiering capability
Storage
overhead
Repair
traffic
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
39. Tiering
Client side caches are great, but only buy so much.
Separate hot and cold data onto different storage devices
Promote hot objects into a faster (e.g., flash-backed) cache pool
Push cold object back into slower (e.g., erasure-coded) base pool
Use bloom filters to track temperature
Common in enterprise solutions; not found in open source
scale-out systems
→ new (with erasure coding) in Firefly release
41. 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 supporting organizations to thrive
Enough breadth to expand and grow the community
Enough focus to do well
42. Multi-datacenter, geo-replication
Ceph was originally designed for single DC clusters
Synchronous replication
Strong consistency
Growing demand
Enterprise: disaster recovery
ISPs: replication data across sites for locality
Two strategies:
use-case specific: radosgw, RBD
low-level capability in RADOS
43. RGW: Multi-site and async replication
Multi-site, multi-cluster
Regions: east coast, west coast, etc.
Zones: radosgw sub-cluster(s) within a region
Can federate across same or multiple Ceph clusters
Sync user and bucket metadata across regions
Global bucket/user namespace, like S3
Synchronize objects across zones
Within the same region
Across regions
Admin control over which zones are master/slave
44. RBD: block devices
Today: backup capability
Based on block device snapshots
Efficiently mirror changes between consecutive snapshots across
clusters
Now supported/orchestrated by OpenStack
Good for coarse synchronization (e.g., hours or days)
Tomorrow: data journaling for async mirroring
Pending blueprint at next week's CDS
Mirror active block device to remote cluster
Possibly with some configurable delay
45. Async replication in RADOS
One implementation to capture multiple use-cases
RBD, CephFS, RGW, … RADOS
A harder problem
Scalable: 1000s OSDs → 1000s of OSDs
Point-in-time consistency
Challenging research problem
→ Ongoing design discussion among developers
46. CephFS
→ This is where it all started – let's get there
Today
Stabilization of multi-MDS, directory fragmentation, QA
NFS, CIFS, Hadoop/HDFS bindings complete but not productized
Need
Greater QA investment
Fsck
Snapshots
Amazing community effort (Intel, NUDT and Kylin)
2014 is the year
47. Governance
How do we strengthen the project community?
2014 is the year
Recognized project leads
RBD, RGW, RADOS, CephFS, ...
Formalize emerging processes around CDS, community
roadmap
External foundation?
49. The enterprise
How do we pay for all of this?
Support legacy and transitional client/server interfaces
iSCSI, NFS, pNFS, CIFS, S3/Swift
VMWare, Hyper-V
Identify the beachhead use-cases
Earn others later
Single platform – shared storage resource
Bottom-up: earn respect of engineers and admins
Top-down: strong brand and compelling product
50. Why Ceph is the Future of Storage
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
Strong foundational architecture
Next-generation protocols, Linux kernel support
Unencumbered by legacy protocols like NFS
Move from client/server to client/cluster
Ongoing paradigm shift
Software defined infrastructure, data center
Widespread demand for open platforms
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Thank you, and Welcome!