Cephalocon 2024: Full Schedule

4 - 5 December 2024 | Geneva, Switzerland
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10:55 CET

Enhancing Observability and Monitoring for Large Ceph Clusters at Scale - Filipp Akinfiev, Clyso GmbH

Wednesday December 4, 2024 10:55 - 11:30 CET

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Maintaining performance and reliability in large Ceph clusters, especially with Rados Gateway (RadosGW), is challenging. Traditional observability approaches often generate excessive data without providing actionable insights. This speech introduces an advanced observability architecture that combines basic monitoring with on-demand detailed and event-triggered monitoring, ensuring continuous visibility and dynamic responsiveness. We'll explore: - The four-layer architecture, detailing producers, the NATS messaging backbone, and consumers. - Monitoring Techniques, including basic, on-demand, and event-triggered monitoring. - A Case Study, sharing proof of concept insights and lessons learned. - Future Directions, discussing potential advancements. This presentation is designed for cloud infrastructure engineers, SREs, and DevOps professionals looking to implement a scalable observability framework that improves system health and performance.

Speakers

Filipp Akinfiev

Senior System Architect, Clyso GmbH

With over 30 years of experience in software development and system administration, I possess a broad technical knowledge in software and system architecture, as well as integration architectures. I specialize in designing and implementing forward-thinking, high-performance software... Read More →

Wednesday December 4, 2024 10:55 - 11:30 CET
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Session Presentation

Audience Level Any

11:40 CET

The SMB Report Card - John Mulligan, IBM

Wednesday December 4, 2024 11:40 - 12:15 CET

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Is 2024 the year of SMB on Ceph? It was for me. In his talk I will discuss the progress of our effort to add managed SMB suport to Ceph. Focusing primarily on the Orchestration aspects of this work, I will talk about some of the major steps it took to integrate Samba with Ceph, some of the projects outside Ceph that help make it happen, and some of our future plans. We will look into the commands needed to set up an SMB Cluster and Shares and demonstrate the workflow involved in connecting some Windows and Linux clients to an SMB Share using Active Directory authentication.

Speakers

John Mulligan

Software Developer, IBM

John Mulligan is a developer at IBM working on the Ceph team. John's current focus is adding SMB support to Ceph. In addition to SMB/Samba John is interested in topics including Containers, Python, and Orchestration.

Wednesday December 4, 2024 11:40 - 12:15 CET
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Session Presentation

Audience Level Beginner

13:30 CET

Bringing a Ceph Based Enterprise Email System Into the Field - Danny Al-Gaaf, Deutsche Telekom AG

Wednesday December 4, 2024 13:30 - 14:05 CET

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Deutsche Telekom operates a growing email system with several million accounts and billions of emails stored on traditional NFS. Six years ago we introduced librmb (librados mailbox) to the community, a universal open source library to store emails in a Ceph cluster. Librmb uses RADOS to store email directly in Ceph to achieve maximum performance through parallel access from many email gateways simultaneously, for millions of active customers. Email systems are much too complex to be simulated in a way which would allow to verify if the switch to librmb will work for a large number of users. Therefore a field test with active customers was necessary to provide an educated guess on the behavior of the final setup. This presentation will cover the results from artificial and real field tests with more than 1 million accounts/users. The results include the experience and learnings of migrating from the existing email system into Ceph, an extended time of running the system and from migrating the accounts out of the test system. We will provide an insight into our learnings, found issues, potential solutions and an outlook into our next steps towards a Ceph based email system.

Speakers

Danny Al-Gaaf

Senior Cloud Technologist, Deutsche Telekom AG

Danny Al-Gaaf is a Senior Cloud Technologist working for Deutsche Telekom. As a Ceph upstream developer he is a driver for using Ceph at Deutsche Telekom. For the last 15 years his professional focus has been on Linux and open source. He works actively in several upstream communities... Read More →

Wednesday December 4, 2024 13:30 - 14:05 CET
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Session Presentation

Audience Level Intermediate

14:15 CET

Follow the Advice, but Not Too Closely - Building the Cluster YOU Need - Gregory Orange, Pawsey Supercomputing Centre

Wednesday December 4, 2024 14:15 - 14:25 CET

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Pawsey receives infrequent blocks of government funding to provide supercomputing, cloud and data services typically at no cost to scientific researchers in Australia. This has a big impact on both the way requirements are determined and on the design and procurement model. Our new 20PB cluster pushes the bounds of what is recommended, for performance and for node density, but we are confident it will serve researchers' needs over the lifespan of the equipment and beyond. This talk will look at the details of this design, and how we determined them, tested them, and increased our confidence of success. Many of these factors are useful in deploying any new cluster, so you will take away some tips on how to get started, or use the experience you already have to build the next one.

Speakers

Gregory Orange

Gregory Orange, Pawsey Supercomputing Centre

Greg deploys and runs Ceph and OpenStack for scientists in Australia, and is involved in the floor tiles, the RGW nodes, the teams who look after it all, and nearly everything in between. Automation and efficiency are of great interest to him, and so is the well-being of all the people... Read More →

Wednesday December 4, 2024 14:15 - 14:25 CET
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Lightning Talk

Audience Level Intermediate

14:27 CET

Erasure Coding: 5 Ways to Split a Squid - Jamie Pryde, IBM

Wednesday December 4, 2024 14:27 - 14:37 CET

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Ceph supports a wide range of Erasure Coding plugins and techniques. This talk will give a brief overview of the different erasure coding plugins supported by Ceph along with some interesting detail about how the various techniques for each plugin works. After giving an overview of the different plugins and techniques, we will discuss our motivations for changing the default plugin from Jerasure to ISA-L, including highlighting some of the more recent optimisations supported by ISA-L. We will also show some preliminary performance results supporting this decision.

Speakers

Jamie Pryde

Storage Software Engineer, IBM

I have been working Ceph performance and erasure coding since the beginning of 2024, after almost 10 years of developing encryption and security solutions for the IBM FlashSystems line.

Wednesday December 4, 2024 14:27 - 14:37 CET
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Lightning Talk

Audience Level Intermediate

14:40 CET

CephBox - A Home Cloud Personal Storage Solution - Karun Josy, IBM

Wednesday December 4, 2024 14:40 - 14:50 CET

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// What if... there is a 24*7 running Ceph cluster at every home? // What is CephBox project? A DIY opensource Home cloud NAS solution with Ceph as the backbone. Why CephBox? A product must be a solution to real world problem: Cloud storage for personal use is 'expensive' and 'superfluous', whereas the external Hard drives and USB stick which we use as alternative have a short 'shell life'; waiting for the memories to be lost forever. Although personal data doesn't have high monetary value associated to it like enterprise business data, it has tremendous emotional value. There should be a de-centralized hybrid solution for personal data storage without cutting off the benefits of cloud storage. I would like to present my research and experience of building a small but efficient Ceph cluster on Raspberry pi servers to manage the storage needs of my family and myself. Agenda : Building a Ceph cluster on Raspberry pi servers. Why is CephBox better than other NAS alternatives. How to use S3 apps to store and automatically backup photos from the phone in the home network. How to create a 3-2-1 storage solution with CephBox which guarantee lifetime longevity of your personal data.

Speakers

Karun Josy

IBM L3 Ceph Engineer, IBM

I'm Karun Josy, I started my Ceph journey around 2016 at the time of release of Jewel version, when I designed and deployed Ceph clusters as the storage backend for a ServerHosting company. Then I joined Red Hat as a technical support Engineer for Ceph and ODF before moving to Ceph... Read More →

Wednesday December 4, 2024 14:40 - 14:50 CET
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Lightning Talk

Audience Level Beginner

15:00 CET

RBD in Squid and Beyond - Ramana Krisna Venkatesh Raja, IBM Canada Ltd & Prasanna Kumar Kalever, IBM

Wednesday December 4, 2024 15:00 - 15:35 CET

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This talk will provide an overview of the new features and notable improvements in Ceph's block device component, RBD, in the Squid release. We will discuss topics such as the new feature to mirror RBD groups, improvements in live-migrating RBD images, various performance optimizations in RBD, and improved support for Windows. The session will also cover what's next for RBD in the Tentacle release. The goal is to keep new and experienced RBD users up-to-date with the latest that RBD has to offer and future plans for RBD.

Speakers

Prasanna Kumar Kalever

IBM, Software Architect, IBM

Prasanna Kumar Kalever works as a Software Architect at IBM and is a member of Ceph RBD team. Ex-RedHatter, Author of block storage support on Gluster which kick started RedHat's Openshift Data Foundation, also instrumental to its integration with Kubernetes. His contributions include... Read More →

Ramana Raja

Senior Software Engineer, IBM Canada Ltd

I am a developer working on Ceph's RBD component with a focus on RBD mirroring. I have made numerous code contributions to RBD and CephFS components of the Ceph project. I was previously the maintainer of the CephFS's driver for the Open Stack Manila project. I've also contributed... Read More →

Wednesday December 4, 2024 15:00 - 15:35 CET
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Session Presentation

Audience Level Beginner

15:55 CET

Ceph at 20 Years! Still the Best for Modern Storage - Dan van der Ster, CLYSO

Wednesday December 4, 2024 15:55 - 16:30 CET

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This talk explores why Ceph is the best software-defined storage solution available, highlighting its evolution since 2004 and its leadership over today's alternatives. Ceph uses innovative technologies to stay relevant. It offers block, object, and file storage through a unified system, reducing complexity and management overhead. CRUSH and Placement Groups provide scalability and resilience, allowing Ceph clusters to span hardware generations without disruptive migrations. BlueStore enhances performance with flexible replication and erasure coding. Stretch clusters and mirroring enable robust disaster recovery. Scale-out metadata in RGW and CephFS support performance for AI workloads. Ceph remains trendy with top integrations for on-premises cloud platforms, thanks to its pluggable architecture and community contributions. It's free, open-source, vendor-free, and easily installable with orchestration tools. With competition closing in, Ceph's community must innovate to stay ahead. We'll offer insights from today's toughest storage requirements, suggesting technical evolutions for the OSD, RGW, and MDS to keep Ceph at the forefront of software-defined storage solutions.

Speakers

Dan van der Ster

CTO, CLYSO

Dan is CTO for CLYSO, developing and supporting solutions with Ceph, open infrastructure, and cloud native products and services. Dan contributes to the open source Ceph Foundation and community as Executive Council Member since 2021 and Board Member since 2015. Previously Dan was... Read More →

Wednesday December 4, 2024 15:55 - 16:30 CET
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Session Presentation

Audience Level Any

16:40 CET

Maximizing the Value of Your Rados Gateway with Ingress Strategies - Michaela Lang, Red Hat & Daniel Parkes, IBM

Wednesday December 4, 2024 16:40 - 17:15 CET

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Drawing from the insights gained from attending Ceph Days 2022, Customers previous talks, and my personal experience with ServiceMesh deployments, I have observed that many organizations need help implementing a cluster-wide rate limiting and metrics visibility across their RGW and Buckets. We discover a range of exciting use cases as we explore Envoy's capabilities in rate limiting, filtering, and collecting metrics on S3 activities executed against RGW. These include header-based filtering for multi-region deployments, additional OAuth token enforcement, and the ability to monitor user-to-bucket metrics without post-processing command outputs at ease. To illustrate these capabilities, I will lead a hands-on lab demonstration, showcasing Envoy's frontend role for RGW on various use cases. Rate limiting S3 requests per client Rate limiting S3 requests per region Rate limiting S3 requests per user/address/bucket (more granular level of control) Utilize Prometheus for metrics collection and monitoring Examine the use of geo-regional traffic flow scenarios in RGW Examine the use of traffic stream replication for disaster recovery scenarios in RGW

Speakers

Michaela Lang

Ms, Red Hat

Born in Vienna in 1977 started with Red Hat Linux 6 in 99 and managed to put my fingers on nearly all technoligies now landed at Red Hat where I even get paid for doing things I love to do.

Daniel Parkes

IBM Storage Ceph Technical Product Manager, IBM

Daniel Parkes has been a die-hard Infrastructure enthusiast for many years with a massive passion for open-source technologies and a keen eye for innovation. Daniel is working in the IBM Storage Ceph Product Management team, focusing on the IBM Storage Ceph Object Storage offering... Read More →

Wednesday December 4, 2024 16:40 - 17:15 CET
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Session Presentation

Audience Level Any

17:25 CET

User Feedback: Shaping the Future of Ceph - Dan van der Ster, CLYSO

Wednesday December 4, 2024 17:25 - 18:00 CET

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Join us for an interactive Birds of a Feather session where Ceph users come together with developers to share their experiences. This is your chance to provide direct feedback on what’s working well and what’s not in your Ceph deployments. Whether you’ve had successes or faced challenges, your insights are crucial. Together, we’ll discuss concrete technical ideas for improvements and collaborate on shaping the future of Ceph. Bring your experiences, pain points, and suggestions to help make Ceph even better!

Speakers

Dan van der Ster

CTO, CLYSO

Wednesday December 4, 2024 17:25 - 18:00 CET
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Birds of a Feather

Audience Level Any

10:50 CET

Ceph Telemetry - The Why, What, and How - Yaarit Hatuka, IBM

Thursday December 5, 2024 10:50 - 11:25 CET

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Whether you are a Ceph user or a developer, you have probably wondered at some point: How many Ceph clusters are out there? What Ceph versions are they running? What does their storage capacity distribution look like? Answers to these questions and more are available thanks to Ceph’s telemetry module. In this session, we will deep dive into this module and explore the value it brings to users and developers alike.

Speakers

Yaarit Hatuka

Senior software engineer, IBM

Senior software engineer at IBM working on Ceph telemetry and observability

Thursday December 5, 2024 10:50 - 11:25 CET
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Session Presentation

Audience Level Any

11:35 CET

Ceph Operations Retrospective: Lessons from Scaling and Managing a Multi-PB Cluster - Mattias Skohg, Engin IT Nordic AB

Thursday December 5, 2024 11:35 - 12:10 CET

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This talk will cover our experiences managing and scaling a Ceph cluster (pacific) from 4.5PB to 9PB) (raw) while in production, primarliy using CephFS and RGW. We will go through the cluster design and hardware, operational challenges, bugs hit, decisions made and how we resolved them.

Speakers

Mattias Skohg

CTO, Engin IT Nordic AB

Mattias is the co-founder of Engin IT Nordic AB and a senior storage consultant. He has designed, installed and in many cases managed clusters with a combined capacity of over over 50PB.

Thursday December 5, 2024 11:35 - 12:10 CET
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Session Presentation

Audience Level Any

13:40 CET

Volume Shadow Copies with CephFS: A Samba-Centric Approach - Shwetha Acharya, IBM

Thursday December 5, 2024 13:40 - 14:15 CET

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In this talk, we delve into the integration of snapshots as shadow copies within CephFS, emphasizing their utilization and management from a Windows client perspective through Samba. The focus will be on the vfs_ceph_snapshots module, which facilitates the seamless presentation of CephFS snapshots as volume shadow copies to Windows clients. This capability is effective both in environments using kernel mounts and those employing the ceph VFS module, offering a flexible approach to snapshot management. We will conduct practical demonstrations to showcase the process of creating, accessing, and restoring these snapshots, while also evaluating the observations made. Furthermore, the presentation will outline future plans aimed at enhancing the reliability and versatility of this functionality, ensuring it meets the evolving needs of users.

Speakers

Shwetha Acharya

Miss, IBM

I work for the CephFS Engineering team at IBM, where I focus on SMB integration with CephFS. I also maintain the Geo-Replication component of GlusterFS.

Thursday December 5, 2024 13:40 - 14:15 CET
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Session Presentation

Audience Level Beginner

14:25 CET

Bringing fscrypt Encryption to CephFS Userspace - Christopher Hoffman, IBM

Thursday December 5, 2024 14:25 - 15:00 CET

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The Linux kernel provides support for fscrypt encryption to a variety of filesystems. These include kernel based file systems such as CephFS and ext4. The speaker will discuss the journey of bringing fscrypt support to libcephfs and ceph-fuse. This support of fscrypt in CephFS userspace will be the first major implementation outside the kernel. To introduce the audience to fscrypt, an overview is provided. Then the motivation for this new capability and current status is discussed. Finally examples will be shown of how the feature can be used.

Speakers

Christopher Hoffman

Software Engineer, IBM

Christopher has been involved in object storage for nearly a decade. He has been a user, system administrator, system integrator and a software engineer. He currently is a software engineer on the IBM CephFS team.

Thursday December 5, 2024 14:25 - 15:00 CET
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Session Presentation

15:10 CET

Hyperconvergence Using Proxmox and Ceph; A Journey Through Data and Time - Iztok Gregori, Elettra-Sincrotrone Trieste

Thursday December 5, 2024 15:10 - 15:45 CET

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This is the story of a hyperconverged cluster based on Proxmox and Ceph. It follows the history of the cluster, from its troubled infancy to it becoming a full-grown (almost intellectually stable) adult. Our journey includes some challenges and pitfalls as well as the birth of new clusters, which are essential for the operation of our particle accelerators. In fact, this is a story about how Proxmox and Ceph can work together to achieve a really robust storage and virtualization system hosting a number of heterogeneous services.

Speakers

Iztok Gregori

Linux System Administrator, Elettra-Sincrotrone Trieste

Working hard for almost 20 years as Linux System Administrator managing, among other things, 5 Ceph clusters

Thursday December 5, 2024 15:10 - 15:45 CET
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Session Presentation

16:05 CET

Get That Cluster Back Online, but Hurry Slowly - Gregory Orange, Pawsey Supercomputing Centre

Thursday December 5, 2024 16:05 - 16:40 CET

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Pawsey offers supercomputing, cloud and data services to Australian researchers, and our Petabyte-scale Ceph RGW clusters have become the central storage solution no matter which combination of services is required. Ceph is both complicated and resilient, meaning there are many things which can go wrong. However, with a suitable design and in the right hands the data is protected and the service can be brought back online. I would like to tell you about the months-long situation leading to a significant outage of our largest cluster, problems we encountered, how we discovered and fixed them, who helped along the way, and the lessons we have recorded for the future. These lessons relate to chasing masked errors, technology choices, team resources and community engagement.

Speakers

Gregory Orange

Gregory Orange, Pawsey Supercomputing Centre

Thursday December 5, 2024 16:05 - 16:40 CET
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Session Presentation

Audience Level Intermediate

16:50 CET

Pulpito 2.0: A Tour of Pulpito Next-Generation - Vallari Agrawal, IBM

Thursday December 5, 2024 16:50 - 17:00 CET

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Introducing the new Pulpito interface with unique features, including job scheduling from web, one-click run termination, rerunning and sharing saved command configurations, and more! This talk will walk you through all the new capabilities and tricks of Pulpito-NG, which streamline the entire Teuthology experience.

Speakers

Vallari Agrawal

Software Engineer, IBM

Vallari is a Software Engineer at IBM Ceph. She is a member of Ceph NVMe-oF and Teuthology team, and is additionally a Google Summer of Code Mentor and Org Admin.

Thursday December 5, 2024 16:50 - 17:00 CET
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Lightning Talk

Audience Level Beginner

17:02 CET

Characterizing Crc Operation on Ceph - Rixin Luo, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd

Thursday December 5, 2024 17:02 - 17:12 CET

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A cyclic redundancy check (CRC) is an error-detecting code widely used in digital networks and storage devices to identify accidental changes in digital data. Ceph employs CRC checksums to ensure data correctness during network transmission and to maintain data integrity in Bluestore. For RBD 4K random write and random read workloads, we observed that the CRC32C operation size primarily ranges from 4 to 292 bytes. Specifically, for 4K random writes, 80% of the operations are smaller than 292 bytes, while for 4K random reads, 83% are smaller than 254 bytes. The most common sizes are 28 bytes and 41 bytes, accounting for nearly 40%; these correspond to 'preamble_block_t' and 'ceph_msg_header2', respectively. Given the characteristics of the CRC32C operation, we optimized it for smaller sizes by using inline assembly code to unfold the CRC32C function 'ceph_crc32c_aarch64'. Additionally, we optimized the encoding procedure to minimize the occurrence of small-sized data segments. We tested these optimizations on the RBD 4K random write and random read workloads, resulting in a 2% improvement in throughput.

Speakers

Rixin Luo

Senior software engineer, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd

I am a senior software engineer from Huawei. I have worked for years on enabling and optimizing Ceph performance on aarch64.

Thursday December 5, 2024 17:02 - 17:12 CET
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Lightning Talk

Audience Level Intermediate

17:15 CET

Async I/O with Libcephfs - Dhairya Parmar, IBM

Thursday December 5, 2024 17:15 - 17:25 CET

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File system gateways like NFS-Ganesha are capable of immense throughput but can be hindered by thread-centric synchronicity. The default I/O interfaces built in libcephfs rely on threading this way which makes it difficult to achieve high performance throughput. Enter async I/O in libcephfs – a transformative approach that changes how file system gateways interact with CephFS. By leveraging async I/O, protocols can maximize resource utilization, enhance system responsiveness especially to low latency operations. In this talk, we will explore how NFS-Ganesha led to the development of async I/O in CephFS, detailing its journey from inception through various phases of improvement and stabilization. We will discuss the current state of async I/O in CephFS, including how NFS-Ganesha makes the most out of it, how it boosts performance with CephFS, and future applications of the API on other gateways. Think I/O in CephFS? Think Async I/O!

Speakers

Dhairya Parmar

Software Engineer, IBM

Dhairya is an open-source enthusiast currently part of the CephFS team. He primarily works on the CephFS client, MDS (Metadata Server), and the manager NFS module. Before joining Ceph, he interned at Red Hat, where he worked on converting legacy sudo-SSSD bash scripts into efficient... Read More →

Thursday December 5, 2024 17:15 - 17:25 CET
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Lightning Talk

Audience Level Intermediate

17:35 CET

Deploy Ceph in Kubernetes: Rook Deep Dive - Travis Nielsen & Subham Rai, IBM

Thursday December 5, 2024 17:35 - 18:10 CET

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Do you run Kubernetes? Rook is the answer to natively integrate Ceph with Kubernetes, with K8s workloads running in production for over six years. Rook configures Ceph to provide stable block (RWO), shared file system (RWX), and object storage (S3). We will give an overview of Rook as well as deep dive into the core configuration features including encryption, recent feature additions, and future plans for the project. Rook was accepted as a graduated project by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in October 2020.

Speakers

Travis Nielsen

Rook Lead Maintainer, IBM

Travis Nielsen is a Senior Technical Staff Member for IBM where he is a maintainer on Rook and member of the ODF and Ceph engineering team. Prior to IBM and Red Hat, Travis worked in storage at Quantum and Symform, a P2P storage startup, and was an engineering lead for the Windows... Read More →

Subham Rai

Software Engineer, IBM

I'm Subham Rai from India. I have more than 3 years of experience in software or more specifically in the storage industry working mainly in rook-ceph. I hold a B.tech degree and I'm also RHCSA certified. I have spoken at FOSDEM 2022, Cephalocon 2023(Amsterdam). I'm in the top 4... Read More →

Thursday December 5, 2024 17:35 - 18:10 CET
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Session Presentation

Audience Level Intermediate