BlueStore is a Ceph object store that is primarily designed to address the limitations of filestore, which, as of the Kraken release, is the current object store. Initially, a new object store was being developed to replace filestore, with a highly original name of NewStore. NewStore was a combination of RocksDB, a key value store to store metadata and a standard portable operating system interface (POSIX) filesystem for the actual objects. However, it quickly became apparent that using a POSIX filesystem still introduced high overheads, which was one of the key reasons from trying to move away from filestore.

Thus, BlueStore was born; using raw block devices in combination with RocksDB, a number of problems were solved that had stunted NewStore. The name BlueStore was a reflection of the combination of the words Block and NewStore:

Block+NewStore=BlewStore=BlueStore

BlueStore is designed to remove the double write penalty associated with filestore and improve performance. Also, with the ability to now have more control over the way objects are stored on disk, additional features, such as checksums and compression, can be implemented.