Ceph provides block, file, and object storage via the built-in interfaces which will meet the requirements of a large number of users. However, in some scenarios where an application is developed internally, there may be benefits to directly interfacing it into Ceph via the use of librados. Librados is the Ceph library that allows applications to directly read and write objects to the RADOS layer in Ceph.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

• What is librados?
• How to use librados and what languages it supports
• How to write an example librados application
• How to write a librados application that stores image files in Ceph using Python
• How to write a librados application using atomic operations using C++