Librados is the Ceph library which you can include in your own applications to allow you to directly talk to a Ceph cluster using the native protocols. As librados communicates with Ceph using its native communication protocols, it allows your application to harness the full power, speed, and flexibility of Ceph, instead of having to make use of high-level protocols like Amazon S3. A vast array of functions allows your application to read and write simple objects all the way to advanced operations, where you might want to wrap several operations in a transaction or run them asynchronously. Librados is available for several languages, including C, C++, Python, PHP, and Java.