Ceph provides block, file, and object storage via built-in interfaces that will meet the requirements of a large number of users. However, in 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?
• Using librados and what languages it supports
• Writing an example librados application
• Writing a librados application that stores image files in Ceph using Python
• Writing a librados application using atomic operations with C++