Cloud native

Ceph is Kubernetes-native storage.

Deploy and manage entire Ceph clusters through Kubernetes with the Rook operator, provision block and file volumes on demand with the Ceph CSI driver, and run every daemon in containers wherever your platform lives.

Run Ceph with the Rook operator

Rook is the Ceph documentation's preferred way to run Ceph on Kubernetes: a specialized operator that deploys, configures, upgrades, and manages whole clusters through Kubernetes APIs.

A graduated Cloud Native Computing Foundation project, Rook turns Ceph into a set of Kubernetes resources: declare the cluster you want, and the operator makes it so, handling bootstrap, monitor placement, OSD provisioning, and day-two operations. It also connects Kubernetes workloads to existing external Ceph clusters, so the same storage can serve platforms inside and outside Kubernetes.

Get started with Rook

  • Rook project

    Overview, community, and releases at rook.io, with development in the open on GitHub.

  • Quickstart

    A test cluster is a few manifests away: follow the Rook quickstart guide.

  • Recommended methods

    The Ceph installation guide recommends Rook for Kubernetes and cephadm everywhere else.

Volumes on demand with Ceph CSI

The Ceph CSI driver provisions storage for Kubernetes workloads dynamically: RBD-backed block volumes and CephFS-backed shared file volumes, created the moment a claim asks for them.

Snapshots, cloning, and volume expansion are built in, so the storage features platform teams expect from a cloud arrive with your own cluster. Because RBD images are striped as objects across the cluster, container volumes inherit Ceph's replication, self-healing, and scale.

Block devices and Kubernetes Ceph CSI on GitHub

Containerized everywhere

Outside Kubernetes, cephadm deploys and manages every Ceph daemon in containers, using Podman or Docker under systemd.

It is one of the two installation methods the documentation recommends, and it brings the same declarative, self-managing model to bare metal and virtual machines: a containerized control plane, integrated upgrades, and orchestration through the CLI and dashboard.

Read the cephadm guide

Discover more

  • Cloud-native storage in practice

    An introduction to persistent container storage with Ceph, from the case studies collection.

    Read the case study

  • Our cloud-native vision

    Why Ceph is built to live where modern platforms live, on the Vision page's cloud-native section.

    Read the vision

  • Getting started

    Packages, containers, and your first cluster: everything you need to begin running Ceph today.

    Get started with Ceph