One of the drawbacks of a cloud infrastructure is the storage. Every cloud infrastructure needs a storage system that is reliable, low-cost, and scalable with a tighter integration than its other cloud components. There are many traditional storage solutions out there in the market that claim to be cloud-ready, but today, we not only need cloud readiness, but also a lot more beyond that. We need a storage system that should be fully integrated with cloud systems and can provide lower TCO without any compromise to reliability and scalability. Cloud systems are software-defined and are built on top of commodity hardware; similarly, it needs a storage system that follows the same methodology, that is, being software-defined on top of commodity hardware, and Ceph is the best choice available for cloud use cases.
Ceph has been rapidly evolving and bridging the gap of a true cloud storage backend. It is grabbing the center stage with every major open source cloud platform, namely OpenStack, CloudStack, and OpenNebula. Moreover, Ceph has succeeded in building up beneficial partnerships with cloud vendors such as Red Hat, Canonical, Mirantis, SUSE, and many more. These companies are favoring Ceph big time and including it as an official storage backend for their cloud OpenStack distributions, thus making Ceph a red-hot technology in cloud storage space.
The OpenStack project is one of the finest examples of open source software powering public and private clouds. It has proven itself as an end-to-end open source cloud solution. OpenStack is a collection of programs, such as Cinder, Glance, and Swift, which provide storage capabilities to OpenStack. These OpenStack components require a reliable, scalable, and all in one storage backend such as Ceph. For this reason, OpenStack and Ceph communities have been working together for many years to develop a fully compatible Ceph storage backend for the OpenStack.
Cloud infrastructure based on Ceph provides much-needed flexibility to service providers to build Storage-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service solutions, which they cannot achieve from other traditional enterprise storage solutions as they are not designed to fulfill cloud needs. Using Ceph, service providers can offer low-cost, reliable cloud storage to their customers.