Object storage is an approach to storing data in the form of objects rather than traditional files and blocks. Object-based storage has been getting a lot of industry attention. Organizations that look for flexibility for their enormous data are rapidly adopting object storage solutions. Ceph is known to be a true object-based storage system.
Ceph is a distributed object storage system, which provides an object storage interface via Ceph's object gateway, also known as the RADOS gateway (radosgw). The RADOS gateway uses libraries such as librgw (the RADOS gateway library) and librados, allowing applications to establish a connection with the Ceph object storage. Ceph delivers one of the most stable multitenant object storage solutions accessible via a RESTful API.
The RADOS gateway provides a RESTful interface to the user application to store data on the Ceph storage cluster. The RADOS gateway interfaces are:
- Swift compatibility: This is an object storage functionality for the OpenStack Swift API
- S3 compatibility: This is an object storage functionality for the Amazon S3 API
- Admin API: This is also known as the management API or native API, which can be used directly in the application to gain access to the storage system for management purposes
To access Ceph's object storage system, you can also bypass the RADOS gateway layer, thus making accessibility more flexible and quicker. The librados software libraries allow user applications to directly access Ceph object storage via C, C++, Java, Python, and PHP. Ceph object storage has multisite capabilities; that is, it provides solutions for disaster recovery. Multisite object storage configuration can be achieved by RADOS or by federated gateways. The following diagram shows different API systems that can be used with Ceph: