Our Very First Ceph Day

rturk

Last Friday we had our very first day-long workshop dedicated to Ceph…in beautiful Amsterdam! The Ceph project has had a nice, long string of “firsts” lately and it was exciting to witness this one in person.

The event was organized by Inktank and 42on, a new Ceph company and this month’s Featured Contributor! The team at 42on did an amazing job organizing the venue, managing registration, and making sure that everybody had food, drinks, desks, and power. It simply wouldn’t have happened without their hard work and dedication to the community.

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We were fortunate enough to have this event at the stylish and thoroughly excellent Tobacco Theatre. Situated in the core of Amsterdam’s excitement and bustle, the old tobacco factory provided an ideal environment for eight hours of Ceph study: its cozy, warm main room was a perfect refuge from the rainy morning outside, turning bright and cheerful right after lunch when we needed it to.

The day kicked off with a welcome by 42on’s Wido den Hollander. Sage Weil then took the stage to provide a technical overview of Ceph and share his thoughts on why it’s an important piece of tomorrow’s technology stack. To wrap up the morning, Wido shared his thoughts on cloud stack integration and showed a demo of Ceph in Proxmox and CloudStack. After lunch, I took a quick ten minutes on stage to share how DreamHost used Ceph to build DreamObjects, a new object storage service (for the curious, a case study will be published soon). Greg Farnum then gave some sage advice (no pun intended, ha!) about how to design and deploy a new cluster.

Once everyone had taken a much-needed break for coffee and snacks, I was joined on stage by Greg, Kai Dupke from SUSE, and Darryl Weaver from Canonical to discuss the challenges involved in deploying and maintaining systems in today’s scale-out world. Sage and Wido closed the day with an open-ended QA session, including a special focus on how the Ceph project thinks about the challenge of geographically-distributed storage clusters.

Not including the teams from Inktank and 42on, the workshop was attended by over 60 people from a large variety of organizations including universities, service providers, enterprises, and system integrators. In over a decade of attending conferences and seminars, I have never seen a gathering where so many people remained engaged and inquisitive all day. When we asked who had plans to deploy Ceph within the next 12 months, though, almost every hand went up. That might explain it!

For those of you who couldn’t make it (or maybe even if you did and want to refresh your memory), here are the slides that were presented:

We look forward to the next Ceph Day! Given how fun this one was, I don’t expect it will be very long. We hope to see you there.

Share and enjoy,
Ross