ceph-deploy is the official tool to deploy Ceph clusters. It works on the principle of having an admin node with SSH access (without password) to all machines in your Ceph cluster; it also holds a copy of the Ceph configuration file. Every time you carry out a deployment action, it uses SSH to connect to your Ceph nodes to carry out the necessary steps. Although the ceph-deploy tool is an entirely supported method, which will leave you with a perfectly functioning Ceph cluster, ongoing management of Ceph will not be as easy as desired. Larger scale Ceph clusters will also cause a lot of management overheads if ceph-deploy is to be used. For this reason, it is recommended that ceph-deploy is limited to test or small-scale production clusters, although as you will see, an orchestration tool allows the rapid deployment of Ceph and is probably better suited for test environments where you might need to continually build new Ceph clusters.