Ceph is an open-source distributed storage platform that provides object storage, block storage, and file system capabilities in a single unified system. Originally developed by Sage Weil as part of his PhD research at UC Santa Cruz, Ceph has grown into one of the most important open-source storage projects in the world.
Ceph’s architecture is designed to be self-healing and self-managing, with no single point of failure. Data is automatically distributed across the cluster using the CRUSH algorithm, which eliminates the need for a centralized metadata server for object and block storage. This makes Ceph scale to exabytes of data across thousands of storage nodes.
The platform is the default storage backend for many OpenStack and Kubernetes deployments. Ceph’s RADOS Block Device (RBD) provides block storage for virtual machines, CephFS offers a POSIX-compliant file system, and the RADOS Gateway provides S3 and Swift-compatible object storage.
Red Hat (now IBM) is the primary commercial backer of Ceph, offering Red Hat Ceph Storage as a supported product. Other companies like SUSE and Canonical also ship Ceph distributions. The project is governed by the Ceph Foundation under the Linux Foundation.
