Cephalocon 2024

SWITCH is the national research and education network (NREN) of Switzerland, a non-profit organisation that provides services to the universities and schools of the country. In the storage circle of the cloud team at SWITCH, we maintain and procure Ceph clusters mainly for S3. We have 3 iterations that differ in terms of automation and features namely OSv1/2/3. We currently develop the latest iteration using Ansible in a GitOps way, where the code is the source of truth and changes to the code automatically deploy configuration changes to various clusters. In this session, we will talk about the OSv3 Ansible collection and configuration management repos, where from defining an inventory that looks like the `ceph orch host ls` output and a short yaml file, we can immediately bootstrap clusters that connect together and provide multisite S3, without any manual steps. Now that we deploy our new clusters using the new technologies, we are in the migration phase where we try to maintain the old dying clusters (OSv1/2) and slowly migrate S3 data to the new ones with minimal or no user intervention.