Ceph GlossaryΒΆ
Ceph is growing rapidly. As firms deploy Ceph, the technical terms such as “RADOS”, “RBD,” “RGW” and so forth require corresponding marketing terms that explain what each component does. The terms in this glossary are intended to complement the existing technical terminology.
Sometimes more than one term applies to a definition. Generally, the first term reflects a term consistent with Ceph’s marketing, and secondary terms reflect either technical terms or legacy ways of referring to Ceph systems.
- Ceph Project
- The aggregate term for the people, software, mission and infrastructure of Ceph.
- cephx
- The Ceph authentication protocol. Cephx operates like Kerberos, but it has no single point of failure.
- Ceph
Ceph Platform - All Ceph software, which includes any piece of code hosted at http://github.com/ceph.
- Ceph System
Ceph Stack - A collection of two or more components of Ceph.
- Ceph Node
Node
Host - Any single machine or server in a Ceph System.
- Ceph Storage Cluster
Ceph Object Store
RADOS
RADOS Cluster
Reliable Autonomic Distributed Object Store - The core set of storage software which stores the user’s data (MON+OSD).
- Ceph Cluster Map
cluster map - The set of maps comprising the monitor map, OSD map, PG map, MDS map and CRUSH map. See Cluster Map for details.
- Ceph Object Storage
- The object storage “product”, service or capabilities, which consists essentially of a Ceph Storage Cluster and a Ceph Object Gateway.
- Ceph Object Gateway
RADOS Gateway
RGW - The S3/Swift gateway component of Ceph.
- Ceph Block Device
RBD - The block storage component of Ceph.
- Ceph Block Storage
- The block storage “product,” service or capabilities when used in conjunction with librbd, a hypervisor such as QEMU or Xen, and a hypervisor abstraction layer such as libvirt.
- Ceph Filesystem
CephFS
Ceph FS - The POSIX filesystem components of Ceph.
- Cloud Platforms
Cloud Stacks - Third party cloud provisioning platforms such as OpenStack, CloudStack, OpenNebula, ProxMox, etc.
- Object Storage Device
OSD - A physical or logical storage unit (e.g., LUN). Sometimes, Ceph users use the term “OSD” to refer to Ceph OSD Daemon, though the proper term is “Ceph OSD”.
- Ceph OSD Daemon
Ceph OSD - The Ceph OSD software, which interacts with a logical disk (OSD). Sometimes, Ceph users use the term “OSD” to refer to “Ceph OSD Daemon”, though the proper term is “Ceph OSD”.
- Ceph Monitor
MON - The Ceph monitor software.
- Ceph Metadata Server
MDS - The Ceph metadata software.
- Ceph Clients
Ceph Client - The collection of Ceph components which can access a Ceph Storage Cluster. These include the Ceph Object Gateway, the Ceph Block Device, the Ceph Filesystem, and their corresponding libraries, kernel modules, and FUSEs.
- Ceph Kernel Modules
- The collection of kernel modules which can be used to interact with the Ceph System (e.g,. ceph.ko, rbd.ko).
- Ceph Client Libraries
- The collection of libraries that can be used to interact with components of the Ceph System.
- Ceph Release
- Any distinct numbered version of Ceph.
- Ceph Point Release
- Any ad-hoc release that includes only bug or security fixes.
- Ceph Interim Release
- Versions of Ceph that have not yet been put through quality assurance testing, but may contain new features.
- Ceph Release Candidate
- A major version of Ceph that has undergone initial quality assurance testing and is ready for beta testers.
- Ceph Stable Release
- A major version of Ceph where all features from the preceding interim releases have been put through quality assurance testing successfully.
- Ceph Test Framework
Teuthology - The collection of software that performs scripted tests on Ceph.
- CRUSH
- Controlled Replication Under Scalable Hashing. It is the algorithm Ceph uses to compute object storage locations.
- ruleset
- A set of CRUSH data placement rules that applies to a particular pool(s).
- Pool
Pools - Pools are logical partitions for storing objects.
