Chapter 2. Object storage


The Ceph Object Gateway client is a leading storage backend for cloud platforms that provides a RESTful S3-compliant and Swift-compliant object storage for objects like audio, bitmap, video, and other data. Ceph Object Gateway, also known as RADOS Gateway (RGW), is an object storage interface built on top of the librados library to provide applications with a RESTful gateway to Ceph storage clusters.

Common use cases

The following are some of the most common uses cases for CephFS.

Storage as a Service (SaaS)
Provides scalability and performance for both small and large object stores.
AI, Analytics and Big Data including Data Lake and Data Lake House
Cloud native data lake, with massive scalability and high availability to support demanding workloads.
Backup and archive or large amounts of unstructured data
A unique new way to architect the dataflow in applications which is through event driven architectures.
Data intensive workloads like Cloud Native (S3) object data
Back up and recover into and from an object storage helps improve recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO).
Internet of Things (IoT)
Object gateways serve as intermediatries in IoT systems, aggregating data from various devices, translating communication protocols, and enabling edge processing. They enhance security, facilitate device management, and ensure interoperability, streaming the overall IoT ecosystem.

2.1. Object storage common workloads

Understand the most common workloads for object storage.

Data efficiency
Use for erasure coding, thin provisioning, lifecycle management, and compression.
Data security
Use for object lock, key management, at rest and inflight encryption, and WORM.
Data resilience
Use for backup, snapshots, cloning, and business continuity.

2.2. Object storage interfaces

Learn about the three object storage interfaces.

Administrative API
Provides an administrative interface for managing the Ceph Object Gateways. For more information, see Ceph Object Gateway administrative API
S3
Provides object storage functionality with an interface that is compatible with a large subset of the Amazon S3 RESTful API. For more information, see Ceph Object Gateway and the S3 API.
Swift
Provides object storage functionality with an interface that is compatible with a large subset of the OpenStack Swift API. The Ceph Object Gateway is a service interacting with a Ceph storage cluster. For more information, see Ceph Object Gateway and the Swift API.

2.3. Getting started with object storage

This section lists the relevant tasks required for working with object storage.

Before you begin

See Compatibility Matrix for Red Hat Ceph Storage 7.0 for a list of backup vendors that are certified with Red Hat Ceph Storage as an S3 target.

Prerequisites

There are specific network and hardware requirements to work with Ceph object storage. For more information, see Red Hat Ceph Storage considerations and recommendations.

Setting up S3 server-side security

For detailed information, see Server-Side Encryption (SSE).

Creating S3 users and testing S3 access

For detailed information on creating S3 users, see Create an S3 user. For detailed information on testing S3 access, see Test S3 access.

Managing Object Gateway through the dashboard

For detailed information, see Management of Ceph Object Gateway using the dashboard.

Multi-site replication to enable Disaster Recovery of backup

For detailed information, see Failover and disaster recovery.

Deploying Ceph Object Gateway with Ceph Orchestrator

Ceph Object Gateway is deployed by either using the Ceph Orchestrator with the command line interface or by using the service specification. You can also configure multi-site Ceph Object Gateways, and remove the Ceph Object Gateway using the Ceph Orchestrator. The cephadm command deploys the Ceph Object Gateway as a collection of daemons that manages a single-cluster deployment or a particular realm and zone in a multi-site deployment.

For full Ceph Object Gateway deployment information and instructions, see Deployment.

Alternatively, you can deploy Ceph Object Gateway using the command-line interface. For more information, see Deploying the Ceph Object Gateway using the command line interface.

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