Many Ceph admins exploit configuration management software to ensure correct and consistent application of packages and config files. Popular systems include Puppet, Chef, Ansible, and cfengine. Such systems are invaluable for ensuring that all systems remain consistent and up to date throughout their life cycle, especially when configuration settings are changed and hosts come and go.

Typical configuration management systems allow one to distribute an entire file to multiple managed systems. It is also usually possible to employ templating, a scheme by which a skeleton outline of a file is distributed to remote systems with embedded markup that allows variable interpolation, conditional inclusion of text, iterators, and even calculation of values for the destination file. This allows one to centrally and at scale manage files that may contain both invariant text and system-specific values.

Details of managing Ceph with each configuration management tool are beyond the scope of this book, but many resources are available online. Your natural choice may be a system already implemented by your organization.

One Ceph-specific management system that is rapidly maturing and gaining popularity is ceph-ansible, which as you might guess is built upon the popular Ansible configuration and orchestration tool. We employed ceph-ansible in the previous chapter for effortless provisioning of our sandbox cluster and suggest its use for those starting out with Ceph, or those fed up with doing everything by hand, iteratively.