Calamari is the management platform for Ceph; an attractive dashboard for monitoring and managing your Ceph cluster. It was initially developed by Inktank as a proprietary software, and it was a product of the Inktank Ceph Enterprise that was offered to their customers. Just after the acquisition of Inktank by Red Hat, it was open sourced on 30 May, 2014, by Red Hat. Calamari has several great feature sets, and its future roadmap is quite impressive. Calamari has two parts, and each part has its own repositories:
- Frontend: This is the browser-based Graphical User Interface, which is majorly implemented in JavaScript. The frontend part makes use of Calamari's REST API and is constructed in a modular approach so that each component of the fronted can be updated or undergo maintenance independently. The Calamari frontend has been open sourced with an MIT license; you can find the repository at https://github.com/ceph/calamari-clients.
- Backend: This Calamari backend is the core part of the platform, which is written in Python. It also makes use of other components, such as SaltStack, ZeroRPC, graphite, the Django-rest-framework, Django, gevent, and so on, and provides a new REST API for integration with Ceph and other systems. Calamari has been reinvented in its new version where it uses new Calamari REST API to interact with the Ceph cluster. The previous release of Calamari uses the Ceph REST API, which is a bit restrictive for this purpose. The Calamari backend has been open sourced with an LGPL2+ license; you can find the repository at https://github.com/ceph/calamari.
Calamari has good documentation available at http://calamari.readthedocs.org; whether you are a Calamari operator or a developer working on Calamari or a developer using the Calamari REST API, this documentation is a good source of information to get you started with Calamari. Like Ceph, Calamari has also been developed as an upstream product; you can get involved with Calamari on IRC at irc://irc.oftc.net/ceph, register to mailing lists at [email protected], or by send pull requests on the Calamari GitHub account at https://github.com/ceph/calamari and https://github.com/ceph/calamari-clients
Calamari currently does not provide ready-to-install packages, so you need to build them for your environment. In this recipe, we will learn about building the Ceph Calamari server packages from source. Building these packages is sometimes a challenging task, as you might not get it done in one shot. So, in order to reduce this complexity, I have built the packages for you, which you can download from https://github.com/ksingh7/ceph-calamari-packages, so can skip the following two recipes, directly jumping to the installing prerequisite. For those who are interested in building the packages from source, let's get started.